Quotes

Writing for Wired, Vijith Assar raises some excellent points on how bad actors with capital are the most dangerous threat to any system. Capital can kill code. Capital can kill anything.

I am a firm believer that no system is ever “designed” for the consequences of high adoption. This is especially true with regard to Mastodon, as most of our team has never operated a production Mastodon instance before.

The whole article is 🔥 and well worth a read, but this part of the conclusion hits the crux of Musk’s new dillema. The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.

Draw me your map of utopia and I’ll tell you your tragic flaw. — Laurie Penny, Ship of Fools This is the opening line from Laurie Penny’s piece on a cryptocurrency-centered cruise.

I’m over fifty. Being over fifty is miraculous. You get just a broader view on your previous iterations of yourself, and they all look like miserable failures. But I’m told that the next errand is to have pity on them.

You don’t have to monetize your joy. — Molly Conway, The Modern Trap of Feeling Obligated to Turn Hobbies Into Hustles

[Joanna] Russ had no patience for a genre predicated on the notion of speculative technologies but unable to imagine social institutions and women’s roles in them as freely. She would surely have objected to some of the stories in The Future Is Female.

Warren Ellis’ commencement speech to University of Essex at Southend is a delight to read. I particularly loved this bit. Making mistakes happens when you’re trying something new. It’s how you know you’re bending the envelope.

This is a hell of a speech from New Zealand’s PM on the Christchurch shooting. We cannot know your grief, but we can walk with you at every stage. We can.

I gave a lecture on time travel where, using the “butterfly effect,” I explained that we cannot predict the weather or one’s trajectory in life accurately. Every second in our past matters equally.

Warren Ellis on limiting your availability for both productivity and OpSec: When you reply to this, it doesn’t go to my main email. It goes to a public-facing email account that I have to manually go to.

Politics, celebrity gossip, business headlines, tech punditry, odd news, and user-generated content. These are the chew toys that have made me sad and tired and cynical. — Merlin Mann, Better

When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don’t expect him to thank or forgive you. — The Mountain Goats, “Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton" I’ve been listening to the podcast I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, which is a wonderful show about music, being an artist, and what it means to be a fan.

Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default.

Worry is impatience for the next horror. — Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments Manguso’s 300 Arguments is a wonderful and quick read. This passage keeps floating to the top of my mind, and refuses to leave.

I ended a talk in Manchester a couple of years ago with this: Magic is our language and our story, and we can’t ride the ghost train into a future of haunted machines without them.

People will advise you to write all sorts of sentences. Snappy sentences, lyrical sentences, Hemingway-esque short sentences, long Faulknerian sentences. But there’s really only one kind of sentence that actually works: a sentence that carries the reader forward from the previous sentence.

I don’t actually set out to write political pamphlets. I’m always writing story first, and even before that I’m always writing character first – everything is born of character. But I think that I have some very strong feelings about some things; in particular, ideas of fairness and justice.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

Kindly remember that if, unprompted, you tell someone about your system for getting organized, you are no better than a vegan. — @Pinboard