engineering
quotes
the things we read, that somehow stick with us, more than they might.
By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour: in reality atoms and void.
— Democritus
All media in which you can work directly with the sounds have more in common with any other than with traditional European techniques of working with symbols on paper. Can you imagine painting a picture by having to write a set of instructions for someone else to paint it? But the problem with solo improvisation is that what you can realize is limited by your technique and the nature of your instrument. You can’t do anything beyond what you can play yourself, no matter what you hear in your imagination.
— Laurie Spiegel, The Expanding Universe
Now it seems most machines are square - their design has a goal, to create desire, like a cellphone or a blender or a kid’s toy. But what about the machines that dontt have a goal-based design? These are the round machines of the future, and we must start making their elements now.
— Peter Blasser, source
“Progress means: humanity emerges from its spellbound state no longer under the spell of progress as well, itself nature, by becoming aware of its own indigenousness to nature and by halting the mastery over nature through which nature continues its mastery”
— Theodor Adorno
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilisation.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
they were working: doing what they wanted to do. he was not working. he was being worked.
— Ursula K. Le Guinn, The Dispossessed
to be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. it is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. what we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. if we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. if we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. and if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. the future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
— howard zinn
therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination. this same reason forbids me, then, to recognise a fixed, constant and universal authority, because there is no universal man, no man capable of grasping in all that wealth of detail, without which the application of science to life is impossible, all the sciences, all the branches of social life.
— mikhail bakunin, what is authority?,
if we are to investigate the class composition of climate change, the first and central proposition must be that capialism drives climate change, and the class that drives capitalism is the class of capitalists
— nick dryer-witheford, struggles in the planet factory: class composition and global warming
sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment; cleverness is opinion, bewilderment is intuition
— Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī