Quotes

Any­way, I was forced to do away with democ­ra­cy rough­ly a thou­sand years ago because it was endan­ger­ing my empire.

This com­ing Novem­ber, you may be one of the mil­lions who will pur­chase Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Before you start fan­ta­siz­ing about a Los Ange­les under drone attack and the under­cov­er sol­diers who will save us all, you may want to think about the hor­ri­fy­ing his­to­ry of under­cov­er oper­a­tions and the actu­al­i­ty of drone wars today.

This idea of labour being hid­den in things, and the val­ue of things aris­ing from the labour con­gealed inside them, is an unex­pect­ed­ly pow­er­ful explana­to­ry tool in the dig­i­tal world. … When you start look­ing for this mech­a­nism at work in the con­tem­po­rary world you see it every­where, often in the form of sur­plus val­ue being cre­at­ed by you, the cus­tomer or client of a com­pa­ny. Online check-in and bag drop at air­ports, for example.

retro ’80s graph­ics are sen­ti­men­tal fluff for mod­ern adults who grew up in front of 1980s game-con­sole machines. Eight-bit graph­ics are pret­ty easy to carve out of sty­ro­foam. There’s a low bar­ri­er-to-entry in mak­ing sculp­ture from 8‑bit, so that you can “rup­ture the inter­face between the dig­i­tal and the phys­i­cal.” How­ev­er 8‑bit sculp­tures are a cute, back­ward-look­ing rupture.

I deeply respect Amer­i­can sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty, the way one respects a wound­ed hip­po. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.

Maybe we’ve been so busy break­ing the 20th cen­tu­ry record­ing industry’s machin­ery that we’ve for­got­ten to invent tru­ly new, 21st-cen­tu­ry music.

In the end, the ques­tion I lodge against Home­less Hotspots and eVolo’s sky­scap­er pr0n is the same — is, in fact, the same I ask of all provo­ca­tions, pro­to­types and “design fic­tions”: what spe­cif­ic, his­tor­i­cal spaces, rela­tions and expe­ri­ences are they fore­see­ably like­ly to bring into being, for peo­ple and non­hu­man par­tic­i­pants both?

Je mist meer dan je meemaakt, hele­maal niet erg.

Against fre­quent efforts to dis­miss objects as fan­tasies assem­bled by humans from a pre-giv­en sur­face of expe­ri­enced con­tents, I con­tend that real­i­ty is object-ori­ent­ed. Real­i­ty is made up of noth­ing but sub­stances — and they are weird sub­stances with a taste of the uncan­ny about them, rather than stiff blocks of sim­plis­tic phys­i­cal matter.