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An accident of brain development stacked the deck against children: the mother had three or four years to fuck with your head before your hippocampus began recording lasting memories.
Your consciousness opened its little eyes for the first time and discovered that you were headlong in love with your mom. Being an exceptionally bright and receptive little boy, you also already believed in the historical inevitability of the socialist workers’ state.
He was still a wanting four-year-old, still betrayed by shit that had happened to his brain before he had a self that remembered.
The leading occupational hazard of Leila’s job was sources who wanted to be friends with her. The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners, and many of her sources gave her the impression that she was the first person who’d ever truly listened to them.
“You know, you seem OK to me. I never met a reporter before. You’re not what I expected.” That’s because I’m freaking good at getting people to open up, Leila thought.
“The kleptocracy has definitely improved nuclear security.”
Your identity exists at the intersection of these lines of trust.
Pip’s life seemed like a conspiracy to betray every single person in it.
Like the old politburos, the new politburo styled itself as the enemy of the elite and the friend of the masses, dedicated to giving consumers what they wanted, but to Andreas (who, admittedly, had never learned how to want stuff) it seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten.
It was Andreas’s gift, maybe his greatest, to find singular niches in totalitarian regimes. The Stasi was the best friend he’d ever had—until he met the Internet. He’d found a way to use both of them while standing apart from them.
And yet it ought to have felt good to have a brain and be walking on a sunny morning in Bolivia. The woods were unfathomably complex, but they didn’t know it. Matter was information, information matter, and only in the brain did matter organize itself sufficiently to be aware of itself; only in the brain could the information of which the world consisted manipulate itself.
try to keep one thought in mind: you don’t owe these people anything. They owe you, big-time. It’s your turn to call the shots now. If they give you any resistance, you’re within your rights to nuke them.”
