Camille

“Sometimes I would worry about my internet habits and force myself awy from the computer, to read a magazine or book. Contemporary literature offered no respite: I would find the prose cluttered with data points, tenuous historical connections, detail so finely tuned it could have only been extracted from a feverish night of search-engine queries. Aphorisms were in; authors were wired. I would pick up books that had been heavily documented on social media, only to find that the books themselves had a curatorial affect: beautiful descriptions of little substance, arranged in elegant vignettes—gestural text, the equivalent of a rumpled linen bedsheet or a bunch of dahlias placed just so. Oh, I would think, turning the page. This author is addicted to the internet, too.”
― Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

“What does it mean to be a leftist? Eating vegan? Marching against the banks and then posting about it online with your iPad? The only truly untenable position is to be a militant member of the KKK, or to declare you’re a proud homophobe. Capitalism has completely devoured the Left to the point where it no longer has a hold on the very thing that made up its capital: the noble causes. Now the Left is just a more reactionary form of common sense. It has nothing to do with critical thought. It’s a groupthink party for people who consider themselves to be good people and feel morally superior to everyone else. The only thing they have in common with the old-guard Left is the will to mete out justice to anyone who goes astray—like Che, when he shot all those deserters in Bolivia. It’s a groupthink party”
― Pola Oloixarac, Mona

“For all his inner suffering, the narcissist has many traits that make for success in bureaucratic institutions, which put premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments, and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations

“It’s the duty of every man and woman who has achieved some success in life to pass it on, because when we’re gone, what matters most isn’t what we were able to attain but who we were able to help.”
― Mateo Askaripour, Black Buck