Brian Hoffstein

Add friend
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Brian.

https://www.goodreads.com/dharmabum

Loading...
Thomas Mann
“Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?”
Thomas Mann

Friedrich Nietzsche
“Back then you carried your ashes to the mountain; would you now carry your fire into the alley?”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

David Graeber
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“The funny thing about games and fictions is that they have a weird way of bleeding into reality. Whatever else it is, the world that humans experience is animated with narratives, rituals, and roles that organize psychological experience, social relations, and our imaginative grasp of the material cosmos. The world, then, is in many ways a webwork of fictions, or, better yet, of stories. The contemporary urge to “gamify” our social and technological interactions is, in this sense, simply an extension of the existing games of subculture, of folklore, even of belief. This is the secret truth of the history of religions: not that religions are “nothing more” than fictions, crafted out of sociobiological need or wielded by evil priests to control ignorant populations, but that human reality possesses an inherently fictional or fantastic dimension whose “game engine” can — and will — be organized along variously visionary, banal, and sinister lines. Part of our obsession with counterfactual genres like sci-fi or fantasy is not that they offer escape from reality — most of these genres are glum or dystopian a lot of the time anyway — but because, in reflecting the “as if” character of the world, they are actually realer than they appear.”
Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information

“economy is the collective system by which humans make information grow.”
César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

105164 Summer of Jest — 144 members — last activity Jun 20, 2019 05:02PM
If you've been meaning to read (or re-read) this book—all 1,079 pages of it—then here's a chance to do so before you die, while also being part of a l ...more
year in books
Sam Spu...
957 books | 191 friends

MuzWot ...
2,071 books | 5,425 friends

Robert ...
107 books | 21 friends

Jon Saft
112 books | 121 friends

Alexander
476 books | 138 friends

Federic...
606 books | 207 friends

Javier ...
764 books | 23 friends

Γιώργος...
63 books | 385 friends

More friends…



Polls voted on by Brian

Lists liked by Brian