More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
We teeter on the brink of world financial ruin and a return to the days of trading fucking seashells for food, every fucking day. Worse. It wouldn’t even be like Mad Max. Do you even comprehend how sad that is? Nobody runs Bartertown. That’s the thing, lad. It’s a runaway process. The absolute best thing anyone can do is grab desperately at the throttle. But they don’t. Because it’s a speeding death kaleidoscope made out of tits.”
The future, Dearden, is in fact a return to feudal monarchy. Proper hierarchical governance. An archaic revival, on the unassailable basis that democracy turns everything to shit and our accretion of freedoms has been entirely worthless if not completely toxic to our happiness and well-being. We need a Restoration.”
“It is a hospital, but it has only one kind of patient. People who have tried to look into the future in order to try to save the world and have been driven insane by it. The worst kind of insanity, Adam Dearden. We’ve all been sent mad by grief.”
An expression crept over Asher’s face that was not unlike that of a lonely child being told that Santa had not in fact been strangled to death in an alley in New Orleans.
Sehnsucht. That was the word, wasn’t it? Unusually short for a German compound word with a complex meaning. Nostalgia for a distant country to which we have never been, but which nonetheless may be home. An intense yearning for a comforting alien perfection.
“The thing about the future is that it keeps happening without you.”
The future arrived here a couple of weeks ago and nobody noticed. Because that’s how the future always arrives. You don’t realize it’s here until you bump into it.”
We’re now in a place, you see, where we will never again have a private conversation. We’re never really going to be alone again. We will never again be in a state where we believe that we’re not being watched. Some futurists talk about a thing called the Singularity, where accelerating progress in technology becomes a runaway effect. Like an ascending graph that suddenly becomes a vertical straight line. Think of a Surveillance Singularity. A condition you cannot go back from, because it’s become a runaway effect, like critical mass in a reactor.”
