Sam > Recent Status Updates

I'm not crying, I swear.

"...the sacred and the digital not only don't mix, but are fatal to each other. They are in metaphysical opposition. That what comes through these screens bleeds out any connection with the divine, with nature or with the fullness of humanity."

"...even relatively simple technologies like the shaduf—a lever for lifting water from the river more efficiently—was not much used, even though it was known about. The issue was not a lack of technological knowledge; it was a concern about what its use might do to the shape of reality. [...] 'even simple technologies had moral and indeed cosmic implications.'"

"The left wants a world without borders that somehow also contains welfare states, while the right wants to defend the ethnic makeup of nations without acknowledging that traditional notions of ethnicity are increasingly impossible in the high-tech globalised world that has resulted from the capitalist economy they have always defended."

"The boundaries between real and fake were already blurring, and soon we would no longer even be able to see them. [...] The sign would no longer point to the signified—it would point to nothing at all. Hyperreality would not simply be confused with reality. It would replace it entirely, and we would all be living in it."

"I think of the part of it we interact with daily, the glowing white interface through which we volunteer every detail of our lives in exchange for the information or pleasure or stories told by global entertainment corporations who commodify our culture and sell it back to us. I think of the names we use to describe this interface [...] the web, the net. I think: These are things destined to trap prey."