II

“I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans. And I am rooting for the machines.”
― Claude Shannon

“Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?”
― Steve Jobs

“The diagram of QAnon and New Agers looks more circular every day. It appeared an unlikely crossover, at first: that of violent right-wing conspiracy theorists and seemingly progressive hippie types. But America’s ever-escalating unrest has led a disarming number of citizens (mostly white, middle class ex-Christians—similar to the folks who joined Heaven’s Gate back in the day) to a similarly anti-government, anti-media, anti-doctor place.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism—Understanding the Social Science of Cult Influence

“This is what cinema is all about. Images, sound, whatever, are what we use to construct a way which is cinema, which is supposed to produce effects, not only in our eyes and ears, but in our ‘mental’ movie theatre in which image and sound already are there. There is a kind of on-going movie all the time, in which the movie that we see comes in and mixes, and the perception of all these images and sound proposed to us in a typical film narration piles up in our memory with other images, other associations of images, other films, but other mental images that we have, they pre-exist. So a new image in a film titillates or excites another mental image already there or emotions that we have, so when you propose something to watch and hear, it goes, it works. It's like we have sleeping emotions in us all the time, half-sleeping, so one specific image or the combination of one image and sound, or the way of putting things together, like two images one after another, what we call montage, editing - these things ring a bell. These half-asleep feelings just wake up because of that - that is what it is about.”
― Agnès Varda