is a 30-year-old human being, lives in Chapel Hill, NC, works as Vice President of newfangled.com, reads, writes, draws, and thinks about the future.
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Ask me anything
Christopher Butler
“The most important reason to stop multitasking so much isn’t to make me feel respected, but to make you exist. If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?”
— Jaron Lanier (amen!)
11:00 am • 3 September 2010
“Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it all when you are analyzing a dream.”
— Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols
10:22 am • 2 September 2010 • 2 notes
“The sign is always less than the concept it represents, while a symbol always stands for something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. Symbols are natural and spontaneous products.”
— Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols
4:45 pm • 31 August 2010 • 2 notes
“I think our society is no longer properly valuing the intangible potential of innovation, even if we have to be a little uncomfortable with the risks associated with it, and a little bit willing to fail, pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and try again. We don’t seem to want to do that as much as we used too.”
— Dean Kamen (via)
9:00 am • 31 August 2010 • 1 note
“More important, we may pay closer attention to reading as an element in what used to be called the history of mentalities - that is, world views and ways of thinking. All the keepers of commonplace books, from Drake to Madan, read their way through life, picking up fragments of experience and fitting them into patterns. The underlying affinities that held those patterns together represented an attempt to get a grip on life, to make sense of it, not by elaborating theories but by imposing form on matter. Commonplacing was like quilting: it produced pictures, some more beautiful than others, but each of them interesting in its own way. They reveal patterns of culture: the segments that went into it, the stitching that connected them, the tears that pulled them apart, and the common cloth of which they were composed.”
— Robert Darnton, The Mysteries of Reading, from The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, page 173
9:00 am • 28 August 2010 • 3 notes
“The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.”
— Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety, page 44
4:09 pm • 27 August 2010
“This successful industry of England, with its plethoric wealth…which of us has it enriched? We have sumptuous garnitures for our life, but have forgotten to live in the middle of them. Many men eat finer cookery, drink dearer liquors, but in the heart of them, what increase of blessedness is there? Are they happier, beautifuller, stronger, braver? Are they even what they call ‘happier’? Do they look with satisfaction on more things and human faces in this God’s Earth; do more things and human faces look with satisfaction on them? Not so…We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.”
— Thomas Carlyle, 1843 (writing of England, but his words could easily be applied to present-day America)
9:00 am • 26 August 2010
“Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another - which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver. The new car will rapidly be absorbed, like all the other wonders we already own, into the material backdrop of our lives, where we will hardly register its existence - until the night when a burglar does us the paradoxical service of smashing a window to steal the radio and brings home to us, in the midst of the shattered glass, how much we had to be grateful for.”
— Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety, pg. 197
4:39 pm • 25 August 2010 • 2 notes
“There is no wealth but life, life, including all its powers of love, of joy and of admiration. That country is richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his posessions, over the lives of others…Many of the persons commonly considered wealthy are, in reality, no more wealthy than the locks of their own strong boxes, they being inherently and eternally incapable of wealth.”
— John Ruskin, 1860
9:00 am • 25 August 2010 • 1 note
“Rousseau’s Discourse goes on to sketch the history of the world not as a story of progress from barbarism to the great workshops and cities of Europe, but as one of regress, from a priviledged state in which we humans lived simply but were aware of our own needs to a state in which we are apt to feel envy for ways of life that can claim little connection to our true selves. In technologically backward pre-history, in Rousseau’s “natural state,” when people lived in forests and had never entered a shop or read a newspaper, men and women alike better understood themselves and so were drawn towards the more essential features of a happy life: love of family, respect for nature, awe at the beauty of the universe, curiosity about others and a taste for music and humble entertainments. It was from this state that modern commercial “civilization” pulled us, according to the philosopher, leaving us to envy and yearn and suffer in a world of plenty.”
— Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety, pg 190
1:07 pm • 22 August 2010 • 1 note
“However disgruntled or puzzled a social hierarchy may leave us feeling, we are apt to go along with it on the resigned assumption that it is too entrenched and must be too well founded to be questioned. We are led to believe, in other words, that communities and the principles underpinning them are, practically speaking, immutable - even, somehow, natural.”
— Alain de Botton on political change, in Status Anxiety, pg 203
4:28 pm • 20 August 2010
“We’re stuck with this very deep problem, this 800-pound gorilla: If it’s all just mechanical stuff everywhere we look, and if every part of the brain is connected to, and driven by, other parts of the brain, then where’s consciousness?” For most folks, the answer might be, “Well, it’s in my mind.” But that begs the question of what we mean by the mind, beyond the physical brain. What is a mind? (Your brain weighs about three pounds. How much does your mind weigh?) Eagleman has no clear way to frame the question of consciousness, much less a way to describe subjective experience: “There’s no equation that can give us the taste of feta cheese.”
— Robert Jensen on the ideas of David Eagleman
9:00 am • 20 August 2010 • 1 note
“Libraries absolutely cannot keel over and let Google replace them. They are our collective bookshelves, the memory theater for a community. As Robert Darnton suggested in the December 17, 2009 New York Review of Books, the U.S. government might do well to acquire Google Books outright. France, after legally blocking Google’s plans to scan its books, is undertaking a digitization initiative of its own. This is, after all, a basically political matter; the bookshelf is a political arrangement. It carries our words, ideas, convictions, memories, identity, and language—the imaginative substance of any political order. Just as a personal bookshelf becomes the extension of one’s body, a democratic society must ensure that its books are held democratically.”
— Nathan Schneider
2:38 pm • 19 August 2010 • 2 notes
“Lines that once separated, say, public from indiscreet, consumers from connoisseurs, sharing from stealing, enthusiasm from compulsion, have been progressively blurred. We can’t trust the horizon to stay fixed, which distorts our own sense of limits. Just when it seems possible to keep up with the information flow, new torrents flood into focus. Just when we think we have mastered the breadth of our desires, other temptations emerge and we spread ourselves thinner. We think we are presenting a coherent picture of who we are online, only to recognize suddenly that we are not so sure of that identity ourselves. We become afraid of missing out on things at the same time we dread the ramifications of becoming clued in. Prodded by the awareness of plenitude within reach, we end up with insatiable appetite for disappointment. Pleasure becomes coextensive with unbounded connectivity, but moral intuition would seem to suggest that unbounded pleasures cannot be sustainable. We end up both wanting and not wanting what technology can provide simultaneously, another reason why the metaphor of addiction seems applicable.
But by expediting our access to ever more data, technology isn’t merely overwhelming our moral or neurological capabilities to resist. Instead, its chief ideological accomplishment is to complement preexisting assumptions about our shared values that are already built into consumerism — that quantity is synonymous with quality, that more is automatically better, that contentment is a mirage, that it’s normal to be ostentatious and to conceive the scope of our ambitions and our identity as limitless (which, incidentally, promises to make us limitlessly productive as we pursue these dreams). It may be that the extent to which we are indoctrinated into those values determines the degree to which we find technology addictive, and nothing inherent in technology makes us compulsive about it.”
— Rob Horning, New Inquiry, Children are Our Future: Resistance, Addition, and the Digital Natives
10:16 am • 17 August 2010 • 1 note
“No one, nowadays, should stick rigidly to what he or she ‘can’ do. Strength lies in improvisation. The blows that count are all landed with the left.”
— Walter Benjamin, ‘Chinese Goods’, One-Way Street (via BookTwo)
9:00 am • 17 August 2010 • 1 note
