Ben

“I want that. That kind of reeling in the wind. All the loose dry teeth, all the old bones of the skull, all the world, and the figure swaying with its stick to make untuned music even death cannot deny.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“stories are able to create a third level of reality: intersubjective reality. Whereas subjective things like pain exist in a single mind, intersubjective things like laws, gods, nations, corporations, and currencies exist in the nexus between large numbers of minds. More specifically, they exist in the stories people tell one another.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. The main argument of this book is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem, then, is a network problem.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“What the example of astrology illustrates is that errors, lies, fantasies, and fictions are information, too. Contrary to what the naive view of information says, information has no essential link to truth, and its role in history isn’t to represent a preexisting reality. Rather, what information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things—whether couples or empires. Its defining feature is connection rather than representation, and information is whatever connects different points into a network.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI