baal

“They were Diegueños. They were armed with short bows and they drew about the travelers and knelt and gave them water out of a gourd. They’d seen such pilgrims before and with sufferings more terrible. They eked a desperate living from that land and they knew that nothing excepting some savage pursuit could drive men to such plight and they watched each day for that thing to gather itself out of its terrible incubation in the house of the sun and muster along the edge of the eastern world and whether it be armies or plague or pestilence or something altogether unspeakable they waited with a strange equanimity.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“And for those of us who are motivated by commitment to a specifically participatory politics of the commons, it’s not at all clear that any blockchain-based infrastructure can support the kind of flexible assemblies we imagine. I myself come from an intellectual tradition that insists that any appearance of the word “potential” needs to be greeted with skepticism. There is no such thing as potential, in this view: there are merely states of a system that have historically been enacted, and those that have not yet been enacted. The only way to assess whether a system is capable of assuming a given state is to do the work of enacting it.”
― Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

“There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim, let them be as though they had not been and all but persuade himself that they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will call them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the most various circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while timbrel and harp soothe his senses or amid the cool silver tranquility of the evening or at the feast, at midnight, when he is now filled with wine. Not to insult over him will the vision come as over one that lies under her wrath, not for vengeance to cut him off from the living but shrouded in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“It’s not hard to perceive a certain deadening sameness that has begun to blanket the world under the sway of the Stacks, as the planet’s extraordinary diversity of lifeways yield to the unlimited perfect reproduction of the modes of taste, self-expression and subjectivity these new hegemons are tuned to. All of them are headquartered on the west coast of the United States, three of them within a ten-mile radius of Stanford University. They share a set of assumptions about who their user is, how that person lives and what they want; they share a grounding in the Californian Ideology18 and the casual technolibertarianism that has long reigned in the Bay Area; and latterly, they even tend to share a single overarching aesthetic.”
― Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life