“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

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never any good at doing in the first place.

- Adam Gopnik, What I Learned when I learned to draw

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear. That’s why it’s so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

- Joshua Foer in Moonwalking with Einstein 

A  quantum computer is the pot that, if watched, really won’t boil.  Charles Bennett described quantum information as being “like the information of a dream - we can’t show it to others, and when we try to describe it we change the memory of it.” When one turns to a quantum computer for an “answer”, that answer, from having been held in that strange entangled way, among many particles, need to surface in just one, ordinary, unentangled place.  That transition from entanglement to non-entanglement is sometimes termed “collapse”. Once the system has collapsed, the information it holds is no longer a dream or a secret or a strange car at once alive and dead the answer is just an ordinary thing we can read off a screen. 

Rivka Galchen, Dream Machine