"we do not want to pay for our memories. The films that remind us of our childhood, the music that accompanied us ten years ago: in the external memory network these are simply memories. Remembering them, exchanging them, and developing them is to us something as natural as the memory of ‘Casablanca’ is to you. We find online the films that we watched as children and we show them to our children, just as you told us the story about the Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks. Can you imagine that someone could accuse you of breaking the law in this way? We cannot, either."

‘We, the Web Kids,’ The Atlantic

"Is this leisure - this browsing, randomly linking my way through these small patches of virtual real-estate - or do I somehow imagine that I am performing some more dynamic function? The content of the Web aspires to absolute variety. One might find anything there. It is like rummaging in the forefront of the collective global mind. Somewhere, surely, there is a site that contains … everything we have lost?"

“THE NET IS A WASTE OF TIME…and that’s exactly what’s right about it.” By William Gibson, 1996.

"But you have to take some risks when you’re a kid to find out who you are. You just have to learn which risks are safe and which are self-destructive. Everybody does weird stuff. As you get older, I believe if you’ve never been allowed to do all that weird shit, then you make it into some kind of obsession that you’re too old to have!"

John Waters

"Isaiah Berlin split intellectuals into two groups: foxes, who know a great deal about many things, and hedgehogs, who know one big thing. But I wonder if there isn’t a third type, too, mysterious and misunderstood: the individual who knows a great deal about one thing—and that thing is herself."

"I also can’t shake the feeling I’m only contributing to the endless glut of sound and vision that is the internet. I wonder how many posts on other blogs I’ve actually read in the last six months, versus how many I’ve saved to read later. Later never comes. I wonder if any of us are truly reading and learning from each other, or if we’re all just treading water."

Every Day the Same Dream.

"The less engaged I become with social media, the more it begins to feel like huffing the exhaust of other people’s digital lives."

Frank Chimero’s Weekly Dispatch: Week 1.

"I’m amused by how intent people are on making human beings immortal or at least extremely long-lived. One of the consolations of dying is that [you think], ‘Well, that won’t have to be my problem’. Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don’t see how you could stand it psychologically."

Jonathan Franzen