Joseph

“Fired by historical grievances and a sense of civilizational destiny, Xi’s China is brash but brittle, intrepid yet insecure. It is a would-be superpower in a hurry, eager to take on the world while wary of what may come. It demands to be seen, heard, and respected, but obstructs outsiders who try to peer past the pomp and propaganda. It exerts a global reach with economic and military might, even as its ruling party retreats into an ideological cocoon. Its choices are reshaping the world, and it behooves us to grasp why and how. Understanding this powerful, opaque, and restless China has become harder than ever, but this is why we must try.”
― Chun Han Wong, Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China's Superpower Future

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“What I think I’ve come to understand, more deeply than ever before, is that the enemy is not technology itself, but rather inequality and centralization of power and knowledge, and that the answer to these threats are education, diversity and justice. You don’t need artificial intelligence to work that out. You need actual intelligence. But more importantly, you need all the actual intelligences – every person, animal, plant and bug; every critter, every stone and every natural and unnatural system. You need a crab computer the size of the world. The problem is never technology itself; after all, remember, the computer is like the world.

I remain as excited as ever about the power and possibilities of computers and networks as I have ever been; I just abhor the structures of power, injustice, extractive industry and computational thinking in which they are currently embedded. But I hope I’ve shown, to some degree, that it doesn’t need to be this way. There are always other ways of doing technology, just as there are other ways of doing intelligence and politics. Technology, after all, is what we can learn to do.”
― James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens