Caleb

“The charming sobriquets that we give our cities - the Big Apple, City of Angels, Baghdad-by-the-Bay, Windy City - are nothing more than picture-book thinking for the benefit of tourists and the child-minded. The terse reality is that the city as we know it and live it is a profit scheme, and future dominated by charter cities built on digital operating systems created by giant corporations will only make the scheme more insulting and inexorable. The charter city is not a home; it is a corporate mandate.”
― Curtis White, We, Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data

“The dissonant irony here is that the affluence that gives the Western Buddhist their privilege, and gave them the opportunity to engage Buddhism in the first place, is part of what the Buddha meant by samsara, the world of attachment and consequent suffering. In a sense, Buddhist practice in the West is dependant upon continued delusion, especially those delusion that cause us to identify with class-appropriate roles.”
― Curtis White, We, Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data

“The Amazon will soon be just another fantastical postmodern location, so familiar to North Americans, where the names of places no longer have any relationship to what’s actually in the place. Mato Grasso (“dense jungle”) will refer to a place that is no more than a factory exchange value in a soybean mono-culture, just as Illinois is a “prairie state” with a mere 0.1 percent of its original prairie remaining. Of course, once the original plant/animal/human inhabitants are gone, we wax sentimental. The things we slaughter become our heritage.”
― Curtis White, We, Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data

“As the boy slices his skin to watch a scar form, he thinks how loathsome and intolerable life was before he thought to do it, and how comforting it is to belong to the new aristocracy of people who have had the imagination to have an intention to wound themselves.”
― George W. S. Trow