Europeans like to sit on thief furniture while Americans like to sit in it. - IKEA Ethnographical Research

Saul Bellow

I began to feel the sensation in my gums warning of something lovely, and with it a close or painful feeling in the chest. People allergic to feathers or pollen will know what I’m talking about; they become aware of their presence with the most gradual subtlety. In my case the cause that morning was the color of the wall with the sunrise on it, and when it became deeper I had to put down the baked yam I was chewing and support myself with my hands on the ground, for I felt the world sway under me and would have reached, if I were on a horse, for the horn of the saddle.  Some powerful magnificence not human seemed under me . And it was this same mild pink color, like the water of watermelon, that did it.  At once I recognized the importance of this, as throughout my life I had known these moments when the dumb begins to speak, when I hear the voices of objects and colors then the physical universe starts to wrinkle and change and heave and rise and smooth, so it seem that even the dogs have to lean against a tree, shivering.

- Henderson The Rain King, p.101

“Hey guys!”

“Oh.. hey man! How’s it going? Weird seeing you here…!” “Haha yeah I know! Well actually I was walking down the street and my iPhone told me you guys are all here so I figured I’d come sit with you.”

“Oh…!”

“…”

“…”

- The Awkward Horrors of the Knowing Where Everyone Is All the Time

Jaron Lainer

Disclaimer: By sharing these quotes on Tumblr I am participating in the exact type of behavior that Lainer believes is watering down the net creative output of humanity.

“Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups… It is a culture of reaction without action.”

“The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to preform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous.  It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments.  The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erased the boundaries between them.”

And finally, ”You have to be somebody before you can share yourself”. Digitally or otherwise. 

This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/08/28/ai-weiwei-on-beijing-s-nightmare-city.html