Brian Hoffstein

“And life confided the secret to me: behold, it said, l am that which must always overcome itself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns
that perpetuate themselves.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

“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

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