April 2012
69 posts
“They seemed to know what most men only guess at. Somewhere out among the swaying grasses of their estates, or in the least visited homes of their rambling homesteads, they had learned the true stories of their lives and known the men they might have been.”
—From The Plains, Gerald Murnane. (via bookoflead)
“
[…] it’s creepy because it seems designed to eliminate all the parts of life that are effectively games of chance. It’s designed to make you 100 percent efficient — and therefore about half as happy.
[…] There is a weird sense in which this technology treats everything unintended as if it is unwelcome: It is fundamentally opposed to the idea of figuring anything out for yourself. It advances the notion that we are entitled to a noncorporeal, completely nonpersonal presence we talk to like a person (“Where’s the music section?”) so we don’t have to expend the mental energy to suffer the indignity and inconvenience of potentially taking a wrong turn in a bookstore. We’re not talking here about turn-by-turn navigation that keeps you from heading for Boston and winding up in Charlotte. We’re talking about stamping out every trace of inefficiency in pursuit of a life where every right turn that would most directly have been a left becomes a problem to be solved.
” —Google’s New Glasses And The War On Serendipity : Monkey See : NPR (via new-aesthetic)