Mark O'Connell > Quotes

“It seemed to me that transhumanism was an expression of the profound human longing to transcend the confusion and desire and impotence and sickness of the body, cowering in the darkening shadow of its own decay. This longing had historically been the domain of religion, and was now the increasingly fertile terrain of technology.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“Irony is a treacherous servant; unless it's very carefully watched over, it has a tendency to expose the foolishness of its apparent master.”
― Mark O'Connell, Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever

“This is one of the problems with reality: the extent to which it resembles bad fiction.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“It was not the building of bunkers beneath private land that would allow us to survive the catastrophes we faced, but the strengthening of communities that already existed.”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

“The idea of whole brain emulation - which was, in effect, the liberation from matter, from the physical world - seemed to me an extreme example of the way in which science, or the belief in scientific progress, was replacing religion as the vector of deep cultural desires and delusions.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent”
― Mark O'Connell, Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever

“The culture of the Epic Fail, in its rituals of comic sacrifice, is a culture of sublimated predation.”
― Mark O'Connell, Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever

“It is both a privilege and a curse of being a writer that throwing yourself into your work so often involves immersing yourself deeper into the exact anxieties and obsessions other people throw themselves into their work to avoid.”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

“I myself am the apocalypse of which I speak.”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

“The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, certainly, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“Trump is only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country's blood - a rapidly metastasizing tumour of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and fear that we might as well go ahead and diagnose a terminal-stage capitalism”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

“Given the world, given the situation, the question that remains is whether having children is a statement of hope, an insistence on the beauty and meaningfulness and basic worth of being here, or an act of human sacrifice.”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

“The world would end neither with a bang nor with a whimper, but with a push notification—a buzzing I wasn’t even sure I’d felt, but figured I’d better check anyway, to see if it was real, and what it might portend.”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

“At the risk of stating the obvious: nobody is going to make America great again. Nobody even seriously imagines it to be a possibility. America might, it is true, eventually stop outsourcing its manufacturing to China, but if those jobs are ever brought back home, they will return in the form of automated labor. Robots and algorithms will not make America great again—unless by “America” you mean billionaires, and by “great” you mean even richer. Its middle class has been gutted, sold off for scrap. Trump is only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country’s blood—a rapidly metastasizing tumor of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and fear that we might as well go”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

“It is true that the gods are dead, because of course we killed them. But their ghosts are still with us, and the anger of those ghosts is righteous and palpable and poetic.”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

“I’d begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“I recalled with some discomfort that the man driving the vehicle had invented the sport of volcano boarding, presumably as a way of solving, in one deft move, the problems of the insufficient riskiness of both snowboarding and hanging out on the slopes of active volcanoes. Although I was not sure that I wanted to live forever, I was sure that I didn’t want to go down in a blaze of chintzy irony, plunging into a ravine strapped into the passenger seat of a thing called the Immortality Bus.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“These robots are literally inhuman, and yet I react no differently to their stumblings and topplings than I would to the pratfalls of a fellow human. I don’t imagine I would laugh at the spectacle of a toaster falling out of an SUV, or a semiautomatic rifle pitching over sideways from an upright position, but there is something about these machines, their human form, with which it is possible to identify sufficiently to make their falling deeply, horribly funny.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“When, some months later, Zoltan emailed me about his decision to run for president, I immediately called him. The first thing I asked was what his wife thought of the plan.

“Well, in a way,” he said, “it was Lisa who gave me the idea. Remember how I said she wanted me to do something concrete, get some kind of a proper job?”

“I do,” I said. “Although I’m guessing running for president on the immortality platform was not what she had in mind.”

“That’s correct,” he confirmed. “It took a little while for her to come around to the idea.”

“How did you break it to her?”

“I left a note on the refrigerator,” he said, “and went out for a couple hours.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“This was what we did as a species, after all: we built ingenious devices, and we destroyed things.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“to those places where the shadows of the future fall most darkly across the present.”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

“when he first got electromagnets implanted in his fingertips allowing him to sense magnetic fields, he did not suddenly feel exhilarated by his newly expanded sensory capabilities, as most people had assumed he would. “What I felt,” he said, “was terrified. I was like, these things are fucking everywhere, and we can’t see shit. We are totally fucking blind.” “Exactly,” said Marlo. “We can’t even see X-rays. I mean, how lame is that?” But”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“Ambiguity is more convincing than certainty.”
― Mark O'Connell

“I pressed him gently on the matter, but he seemed a little reticent, which is maybe what you’d be wise to expect from a cryptologist who was also a practicing hermeticist.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“The smell of hot popcorn drifted upward from the concourse below, lingering in the warm Californian air like an atmospheric irony, and a Jumbotron directly in front of me displayed a blandly handsome announcer seated behind a curved desk emblazoned with DARPA’s logo: a sports broadcast mise-en-scène from some speculative future, vaguely fascist, in which the machinery of national defense had become a spectacle of mass entertainment.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“they seemed to overwhelmingly favor wraparound shades, a preference that was, as far as I could gather, more or less universal among right-wingers as a group. Footage of alt-right gatherings, Twitter avatars of libertarians, images of furious and red-faced men at Trump rallies: in all of these cultural artifacts, I noted the presence of this excessively curved and ovoid style of eyewear;”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

“In passato l'apocalisse, dal punto di vista religioso ma anche secolare, è sempre stata considerata un evento singolo improvviso, un flash accecante dal cielo, una bomba nucleare. Oggi, pensiamo al cambiamento climatico, la fine dei tempi appare più come una lenta dissoluzione. E questo fa sì che non abbiamo il paradigma mitologico per darle un senso, non sappiamo come pensarla, come darle una forma.”
― Mark O'Connell

“I came across one company called NuManna, named in reference to manna, the foodstuff the god of the Old Testament had provided for the Israelites during the time of their wandering after the Exodus. The company marketed gigantic buckets of freeze-dried powdered foodstuffs with a shelf life of a quarter of a century, whose varieties included, but were by no means limited to, oatmeal, hearty beans and beef, cheddar broccoli soup, and pasta primavera mix with freeze-dried chicken chunks. In the Testimonials section of NuManna’s website, I read a brief blurb from a customer named Reagan B., which seemed to me an unwitting encapsulation of the absurdity of the entire apocalypse preparedness project. “This stuff is awesome,” wrote Reagan. “My wife has been away for a while so I ate NuManna while she was gone. It was simple and everything I had was really good. I wish NuManna was around when I bought a bunch of bulk food in the past from the Mormons. I don’t want to have all these ingredients and put them together. NuManna was simple and great tasting. I gave away all my other bulk food.” At first this comment seemed purely and unimprovably comic in its conjuring of a character who, for all his determination to be adequately prepared for the collapse of civilization due to nuclear war or the impact of a massive asteroid, was also the type of man for whom not having his wife around to cook dinner—which seemed to me to be at worst a Domino’s Pizza situation—forced him to crack open his apocalyptic food stash. (Equally bewildering, equally wonderful, was his purchasing food in bulk only to conclude that he lacked the stomach for the labor of assembling all these ingredients into meals.)”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

“If the choice on offer is between pasta primavera mix with freeze-dried chicken chunks and being among the first wave of deaths in the apocalypse, I hereby enthusiastically place my order for oblivion.”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

“But both of us had been radicalized by parenthood. Having children had brought into horribly lurid focus the predatory face of contemporary capitalism.”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back