Stefan

“Choose to be optimistic, it feels better.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“Intelligence is analysing things as they are.
Imagination is conceiving them as they could be.
Morality is conceiving them as they should be.
Magic is making them occur the way you conceive them.

There is no longer any interest in the mental hygiene of killers. Today we have only the mental hygiene of the victim, and the art of using one's own misfortune as a credit card.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Exoteric machines - esoteric machines.
They say the computer is an improved form of typewriter. Not a bit of it. I collude with my typewriter, but the relationship is otherwise clear and distant. I know it is a machine; it knows it is a machine. There is nothing here of the interface, verging on biological confusion, between a computer thinking it is a brain and me thinking I am a computer.
The same familiarity with good old television, where I was and remained a spectator. It was an esoteric machine, whose status as machine I respected. Nothing there of all these screens and interactive devices, including the 'smart' car of the future and the 'smart' house. Even the mobile phone, that incrustation of the network in your head, even the skateboard and rollerblades - mobility aids - are of a quite different generation from the good old static telephone or the velocipedic machine. New manners and a new morality are emerging as a result of this organic confusion between man and his prostheses - a confusion which puts an end to the instrumental pact and the integrity of the machine itself.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000

“What every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes it.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation