Quotes

Although this scene happens in silence, I did actually write dialogue for it. The actors are actually speaking it and it might stand as an explanation for some. In any case, that dialogue will never be written in the published screenplay for the film and I told the actors never to reveal it to anyone. They are bound to silence forever and I hope they will have forgotten it by now, because they didn’t know when they were shooting it what the significance of the scene might be.

Forums and instant messages were the key mediums for speed running theory to spread through the mid-2000s, but it remained a niche hobby. Live video streaming, which took off at the beginning of this decade, has since made it a medium for mass consumption.

What would a game look like if it were designed to encourage a process of reader engagement that consists of coming up with a narrative hypothesis and then testing it? If the discovery of layers of meaning and personhood were achieved through play?

The guidelines would have strictly limited which foods could be marketed towards youth — excluding even peanut butter — but would also have been, yet again, entirely voluntary. Lobbyists for the food industry pushed back, arguing that the rules would “virtually end all advertising” towards those younger than 18. The regulations stalled in Congress, and were just last week “killed for good,” Harris says, with a single sentence in the 2014 omnibus spending bill.

The essential point is that a particular configuration of buildings is neither “good” nor “bad” in absence of a serious examination of the social relations responsible for the construction of those buildings and the greater social processes that continue to shape the greater community in which those buildings exist. In other words, urbanism is not about an object, but about a set of overlapping, constitutive processes that produce a wide range of physical forms. The physical form is largely a reflection of these greater processes and forces.

Man’s first attempts at making his own decisions are called divination. Examples are the studying of omens, watching the stars, throwing and studying sticks and bones (sortilege), ‘reading’ animals’ intestines, etcetera. These are all methods that project the will of the gods, who were still thought to exist, into the external world. So decision making was in this phase a process that took place in the world, not in the mind.

In a culture where the myth of objectivism is very much alive and truth is always absolute truth, the people who get to impose their metaphors on the culture get to define what we consider to be true—absolutely and objectively true.

whether in national politics or in everyday interaction, people in power get to impose their metaphors

Homelessness should never be tolerated in any society and if we start designing in to accommodate homeless then we have totally failed as a society. Close proximity to homelessness unfortunately makes us uncomfortable so perhaps it is good that we feel that and recognise homelessness as a problem rather than design to accommodate it.

This qualifies in an interesting way what some people have seen as Latour’s technocratism, his own “love of technology,” which is suspect to many intellectuals (chiefly Heideggerians, but not only them). Because what Latour loves above all is the technology that could exist, and the social interactions that (can) help to bring it about. He’s not an apologist for the neoliberal order or the effects that technological culture has had, but he does insist on the reality of the networks that science and technology have created, and the possibility of using them to different ends than the ones they are currently used for. From this standpoint, he looks like quite a utopian thinker himself. And while Norbert, like Latour, is reluctant to attribute the failure of Aramis to leviathan-sized macro-actors (“Are you going to accuse the social system? Capitalism? Napoleonic France? Sinful man, while you’re at it?,” 197), there is more than a tinge of pathos in the fact that an innovation that would have helped solve ecological as well as transportational problems was scuttled by technocratic management. And while many of the explanations given by the actors are as good as any a sociologist could come up with, some are a lot less enlightened — e.g. M. Chalvan: “‘Cars belong to individuals; everyone looks out for them. But Aramis would have been collective property. The first time anything went wrong, people would have blown the whole thing up’” (71): a rare appearance of straight-up ideology in Latour’s work. [Cf. also “The Fear of Mob Rule” in “Do You Believe In Reality?”]