Zoomers Quotes

“. On Neopets I am God. I let my Blumaroo and my Xweetok and my Lutari and my Shoyru starve. I want to see if they will die. I want to know the rules. I can’t believe I’m in charge of this little dragon life. I can’t believe I’m in charge of my own little life. I can’t believe that they can’t die. Only things that can be lost matter. I want everything to matter. Can only things that are real be lost? I want everything to be real.”
― Honor Levy, My First Book

“If men create intelligent machines, or fantasize about them, it is either because they secretly despair of their own intelligence or because they are in danger of succumbing to the weight of a monstrous and useless intelligence which they seek to exorcize by transferring it to machines, where they can play with it and make fun of it. By entrusting this burdensome intelligence to machines we are released from any responsibility to knowledge, much as entrusting power to politicians allows us to disdain any aspiration of our own to power.
If men dream of machines that are unique, that are endowed with genius, it is because they despair of their own uniqueness, or because they prefer to do without it - to enjoy it by proxy, so to speak, thanks to machines. What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself.
It is not for nothing that they are described as 'virtual', for they put thought on hold indefinitely, tying its emergence to the achievement of a complete knowledge. The act of thinking itself is thus put off for ever. Indeed, the question of thought can no more be raised than the question of the freedom of future generations, who will pass through life as we travel through the air, strapped into their seats. These Men of Artificial Intelligence will traverse their own mental space bound hand and foot to their computers. Immobile in front of his computer, Virtual Man makes love via the screen and gives lessons by means of the teleconference. He is a physical - and no doubt also a mental cripple. That is the price he pays for being operational. Just as eyeglasses and contact lenses will arguably one day evolve into implanted prostheses for a species that has lost its sight, it is similarly to be feared that artificial intelligence and the hardware that supports it will become a mental prosthesis for a species without the capacity for thought.
Artificial intelligence is devoid of intelligence because it is devoid of artifice.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“When I was 11 it was spelled with a Big I. That was how I was taught it. How autocorrect corrected it. Like god to God. It was a place to visit. A proper noun. The Internet. The thinspo forums and videos of Saddam’s execution and the pics from that bat mitzvah I wasn’t invited to. I could go there and I went there that day after school on my clunky white laptop. I went there and I never came back. I went there because it was a world to escape into. I was Lucy walking through the wardrobe. I walked through the fur coats and when I turned around to face the door it was gone. It was like coming a long way through a dark tunnel and turning around to look at the speck of light from which I came, but there was no light. No opening on either side. No sun forcing its way through. No oncoming train. No place from which I came. The tunnel was and always will be my world.”
― Honor Levy

“In between one heartbeat and the next, I know my time in Boomertown is at an end.
And not even for my sake or Bailey’s, but for Ace’s. I came, I saw, and unlike Caesar, I did not conquer. But then, I never could have done that, anyway.
I think that’s the real secret to the Boomer generation.
They gave us a rigged game from the start. Gen X, Millennials and Zoomers played against the house. We were told we could win if we just worked hard enough, but most of us have lost out in some way or another.”
― I.M. Millennial

“I’m her grandmother!’ my mother repeats, now shouting. ‘I have rights. I get a say in how she lives her life!’
That’s what it comes down to, doesn’t it?
Rights.
Who has the right to dictate to family, friends and the world about how people should live, how things should work and what life means?
Boomers have expressed these rights for decades. And they’ve refused to cede authority and autonomy to the generations that follow. Even the Trailers live in the Boomers’ shadow.”
― I.M. Millennial, A Year in Boomertown: A Memoir