“Between 1880 and 1900, an average of 35,000 workers perished each year in factory and mine accidents, the highest rate in the industrial world.”

-Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History (Brief, Volume 2)

Here is a variant of Wittgenstein’s diary thought experiment, using the inner light in place of private, inner sensation. Suppose I decide to try to discover whether and when I suffer from zombie episodes, episodes of phenomenal absence. So I keep a diary, and I write ‘L’ in the diary on those days when my inner light is switched on. Later, I tell myself, I will be able to look back through the diary and, seeing an ‘L’, be sure that I was phenomenally present on that day, that all was not dark inside. Well, how could I trust any previous occurrences of ‘L’ marked in my diary, even if (contra Wittgenstein) I were capable of unilaterally identifying when my private, inner light was on? After all, if I was phenomenally absent on that day—away with the zombies, so to speak—I would have written an ‘L’ in my diary even in my zombie state. So the ‘L’ can tell me nothing. It seems to have no use even in a private language.

–Embodiment and the inner life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds by Murray Shanahan

“In other words, in the structure of the commodity-form it is possible to
find the transcendental subject: the commodity-form articulates in
advance the anatomy, the skeleton of the Kantian transcendental subject
– that is, the network of transcendental categories which constitute the a
priori frame of’objective’ scientific knowledge. Herein lies the paradox of
the commodity-form: it – this inner-worldly, ‘pathological’ (in the Kantian
meaning of the word) phenomenon – offers us a key to solving the fundamental
question of the theory of knowledge: objective knowledge with
universal validity – how is this possible?

After a series of detailed analyses, Sohn-Rethel came to the following
conclusion: the apparatus of categories presupposed, implied by the scientific
procedure (that, of course, of the Newtonian science of nature), the
network of notions by means of which it seizes nature, is already present
in the social effectivity, already at work in the act of commodity exchange.
Before thought could arrive at pure abstraction, the abstraction was already
at work in the social effectivity of the market. The exchange of commodities
implies a double abstraction: the abstraction from the changeable character
of the commodity during the act of exchange and the abstraction from
the concrete, empirical, sensual, particular character of the commodity (in
the act of exchange, the distinct, particular qualitative determination of
a commodity is not taken into account; a commodity is reduced to an
abstract entity which – irrespective of its particular nature, of its ‘use-value’
– possesses ‘the same value’ as another commodity for which it is
being exchanged).”

-Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Second Edition

“The crucial point is not simply that concepts can only be grasped through their examples, but that the only proper philosophical concepts are those that take into account their own conditions of transmissibility, the always transferential relations in which thought finds itself.”

-Editors’ Introduction to Slavoj Žižek’s Interrogating the Real

Luxury used to define things that made life easier: clean water, central heating, fridges, cars, TVs, smartphones. Today luxury tends to make your life harder. Displaying and safeguarding a Rauschenberg, learning to play polo and maintaining an adequate stable of horses, or obtaining access to the Pope are arduous undertakings. That doesn’t matter; their very unattainability, the fact that these things are almost impossible for most people, is what matters.

-Rolf Dobelli

The paradox of education is precisely this, that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

-James Baldwin

The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.

—Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (1956)

The fact that 23 percent of American women between the ages of forty and fifty-nine take SSRIs may have less to say about this group’s propensity for depression than it does about the way our society currently responds to women between forty and fifty-nine.

-Douglas Rushkoff

Gandalf would be impressed by our ability to teach sand to play chess (in the form of silicon transistors), or be terrified by our ability to destroy a city with a lump of (uranium) metal.

-Neil Gershenfeld, physicist

Our gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.

It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them.

It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.

It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets.

It counts Whitman’s rifle [In 1966, Charles Whitman killed 16 people and wounded 32 in Austin, Texas] and Speck’s knife [In 1966, Richard Speck raped and killed 8 student nurses in Chicago], and the television programs that glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play.

It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

-Robert F. Kennedy, University of Kansas, 1968

No politician would say anything remotely like this today, in any major party, nor the vast majority of the minor parties.

To stamp out anonymity with the intention of making a more civil or humane online environment is to choose a technological solution that merely papers over the underlying social and political problems.

–Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

Seemingly conscious of the rhetorical bait-and-switch she’s performing, Sandberg cautions her readers: “And, yes, this shift to authenticity will take getting used to and will elicit cries about lost privacy. But people will increasingly recognise the benefits of such expression.” Converging your real and virtual selves naturally requires Facebook to know what you are doing and thinking at all times.

Authenticity is an unreachable goal. An important part of identity, as it’s long been understood, is that we act differently in different situations. We put on different roles, we code-switch. We might speak differently with our parents than we would with our children or a coworker or someone we’re flirting with at a bar. At the risk of slipping into something hazily postmodern, there is no single “self.”

–Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

A quarter-century after the advent of the World Wide Web, communication has become synonymous with surveillance. The only unrecorded speech is the chatter of two friends spending a moment together, and one day soon that will change. Sensors and cameras proliferate through our homes and cities like spores, appearing in eyeglasses, phones, cameras, streetlights, cars, game systems, shoes, jewelry, and wherever else a signal may be found. Eventually, if the technology industry’s most fervent boosters are to be believed, our whole world, and all of our sensations and thoughts within it, will be transcribed. Not because it is right or good, but because we can, and because this information, they promise, will be useful. In this temple, anything is worth sacrificing on the altars of efficiency and productivity.

–Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

Those people who tortured like mad then lied about it, they’re the same ones saying we shouldn’t want privacy on the Internet.

–Tim Bray

The difference between science and the arts is not that they are different sides of the same coin even, or even different parts of the same continuum, but rather, they are manifestations of the same thing. The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity.

–Mae Jemison