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“self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers.”
― Thinking in Systems: A Primer
― Thinking in Systems: A Primer
“the recent changes in our reading habits suggest that the “era of mass [book] reading” was a brief “anomaly” in our intellectual history: “We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.” The question that remains to be answered, they went on, is whether that reading class will have the “power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital” or will be viewed as the eccentric practitioners of “an increasingly arcane hobby.”
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“What am I? The data? The process that generates it? The relationships between the numbers?”
― Permutation City
― Permutation City
“In France, this general climate of distrust toward private capitalism was deepened after 1945 by the fact that many members of the economic elite were suspected of having collaborated with the German occupiers and indecently enriched themselves during the war. It was in this highly charged post-Liberation climate that major sectors of the economy were nationalized, including in particular the banking sector, the coal mines, and the automobile industry. The Renault factories were punitively seized after their owner, Louis Renault, was arrested as a collaborator in September 1944.”
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“it is the nature of intelligent life to climb mountains. They all want to stand on ever higher ground to gaze ever farther into the distance. It is a drive completely divorced from the demands of survival. Had you, for example, been only concerned with staying alive, you would have fled from this mountain as fast and far as you could. Instead, you chose to come and climb it. The reason evolution bestows all intelligent life with a desire to climb higher is far more profound than more base needs, even though we still do not understand its real purpose. Mountains are universal and we are all standing at the feet of mountains.”
― The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection
― The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection
Herval’s 2023 Year in Books
Take a look at Herval’s Year in Books. The good, the bad, the long, the short—it’s all here.
1,997 books
|
56 friends
835 books
|
127 friends
244 books
|
112 friends
119 books
|
209 friends
281 books
|
43 friends
1,245 books
|
70 friends
2,228 books
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211 friends
192 books
|
42 friends
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