More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
When I realized this, I grabbed on to it like a life raft, and I haven’t let go. This is real. Your eyes reading this text, your hands, your breath, the time of day, the place where you are reading this—these things are real. I’m real too. I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force; I’m lumpy and porous, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next. I hear, see, and smell things in a world where others also hear, see, and smell me.
I really hate when books don't respect my time
And it takes a break to remember that: a break to do nothing, to just listen, to remember in the deepest sense what, when, and where we are.
It lowk feels disingenuous to not acknowledge the weed/lsd/shrooms that went into this book...
self-care “is poised to be wrenched away from activists and turned into an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil.”22
Why can't i have a nice restorative time to myself while also treating myself to a fancy bath oil? She argues that every spare moment is being swallowed up by capitalist motivations, but in the opposite sense, why does every spare moment need to be a declaration of anticapitalism?
As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural soundscapes, put it: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.”23
Is this whole book just gonna be better writing from other people?
The life force is concerned with cyclicality, care, and regeneration; the death force sounds to me a lot like “disrupt.” Obviously, some amount of both is necessary, but one is routinely valorized, not to mention masculinized, while the other goes unrecognized because it has no part in “progress.”
I think, especially after reading the next few pages and trying to understand her point, that it's really not that simple. She mentions matienence care being a universal experience, and just because people celebrate and honor their caretakers differently doesnt mean they arent a huge focus of admiration in society.
Judging from the amount of sniffling in the theater where I saw this film, many in the audience were also thinking of their own mothers, fathers, siblings, friends. Rogers’s point in the commencement speeches was made anew: we are all familiar with the phenomenon of selfless care from at least some part of our lives. This phenomenon is no exception; it is at the core of what defines the human experience.
I think that maybe im biased because im at a point in my life where everyone is thinking about those who raised them, but this is the part that confused me about her previous point. Everyone loves their parents! (sort-of)
Of course, such a solution isn’t good for business, nor can it be considered particularly innovative. But in the long meantime, as I sit in the deep bowl of the Rose Garden, surrounded by various human and nonhuman bodies, inhabiting a reality interwoven by myriad bodily sensitivities besides my own—indeed, the very boundaries of my own body overcome by the smell of jasmine and just-ripening blackberry—I look down at my phone and wonder if it isn’t its own kind of sensory-deprivation chamber. That tiny, glowing world of metrics cannot compare to this one, which speaks to me instead in breezes,
...more
I honestly hated this first chapter. It's overwritten to hell without actually saying much, taking its best ideas from other works, and it kept repeating the same format of "idea! Concession... But Idea! Concession.." all that being said, i like that it has gotten me to think about where our societal values in attention lie, but i honestly drk if it's that deep. Phones harness short attention spans. I hope it gets better and more layered
All too often, things like digital detox retreats are marketed as a kind of “life hack” for increasing productivity upon our return to work. And the impulse to say goodbye to it all, permanently, doesn’t just neglect our responsibility to the world that we live in; it is largely unfeasible, and for good reason.
YES YES YES. Ive had so many thoughts for so long about how horrible digital detoxes are. This is a good direction to go in
Levi took a shot of tequila, made himself a Bloody Mary, and wearing a white dress and a pink wig, went over and spoke for forty-five minutes on the importance of unplugging from technology, as our friend Ben Madden played a Casio synth in the background. I couldn’t tell you exactly what Levi said that morning since I was delirious, but I do remember that everyone who was there said it was one of the most inspiring talks they had ever heard.
Really... Just delirious... At burning man.... Come on bruh
Morris quotes the festival’s director of business and communications, who unflinchingly describes Burning Man as “a little bit like a corporate retreat. The event is a crucible, a pressure cooker and, by design, a place to think of new ideas or make new connections.”7
I was about to say something snarky along the lines of "tech bros arent allowed to unplug?" but that quote is pretty incriminating. "relax and escape! So you can be more productive..."
He also recalls that Felix sometimes talked of buying land in northern California. Even farther from the city than the old Camp Grounded, this new retreat would let them do whatever they wanted, including nothing: “we could just relax and look up at the trees.”
Need to lnow if felix really really liked weed because if so that changes ths context of this a lot
Somewhere in the line of history, civilization had made a wrong turn, a detour that had led into a cul-de-sac. The only way, they felt, was to drop out and go all the way back to the beginning, to the primal source of consciousness, the true basis of culture: the land.14
Im glad she's being critical (in a really smart way) of communes because this book would have been really hard to read if she wasnt. Anyway i feel like it's so interesting that every new generation fees like they've invented this feeling
“They had burned all their furniture and smoked the last of their grass.
There it is
Frazier’s example of a more productive man is no accident. Like someone running a corporate digital detox retreat, he is obsessed with productivity, claiming fantastically that mankind is only 1 percent as productive as it could be.
Really cool tie back from the utopian society thing. im loving this section; it's well paced and interesting
Preemptively calling it a “peaceful project” avoids the fact that regardless of how high-tech your society might be, “peace” is an endless negotiation among free-acting agents whose wills cannot be engineered.
So when Thiel writes of “new technologies that may create a new space for freedom,” I hear only an echo of Frazier: “Their behavior is determined, yet they’re free.”
Indeed, so instinctively do we understand the value of an outsider’s perspective that history is full of people seeking remote hermits and sages, desperate for knowledge from a mind unconcerned with familiar comforts.
Understanding the impossibility of a once-and-for-all exit—for most of us, anyway—sets the stage for a different kind of retreat, or refusal-in-place, that I will elaborate on in the next chapter.
A fun setup that is well earned. Ive honestly loved reading about the communes
“[y]ou are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else.”61
Thinking about this unavoidable responsibility, I’m reminded of a more recent stay in a mountain cabin. This time, it was in the Santa Cruz Mountains,
This lady is always in a fucking cabin!!!!
This kind of resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the “wrong way”: a way that undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it.
The book kind of randomly flips into using super-academia-y anticapitalist phrasing that i only recognize from debate
It was the image of utter inactivity that so galled Takala’s colleagues. “Appearing as if you’re doing nothing is seen as a threat to the general working order of the company, creating a sense of the unknown,” they wrote, adding solemnly, “The potential of nothing is everything.”4
Is this that deep? The experiement lady just feels creepy
In a society where men have become law-abiding machines, the worst men are the best, and the best men are the worst.
I wish she would talk more about the societal obsession with outlaws (joker and fight club come to mind). She's mentioned it a few times already but I really like her in depth analysis and would like to se her break that part down more
But from Thoreau’s perch atop the mountain of reason,
With his mother close by to do his laundry.
WHEN I WAS working at my corporate marketing job in San Francisco, I used to take long lunch breaks as a small, selfish act of resistance.
Me being 30 mins late to 8am calc
What is needed, then, is not a “once-and-for-all” type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity. We need to be able to think across different time scales when the mediascape would have us think in twenty-four-hour (or shorter) cycles,
Im really not interested in reading this author's acid musings.
As I’ll show in the next chapter, this process enriches not only our capacity to resist, but even more simply, our access to the one life we are given. It can open doors where we didn’t see any, creating landscapes in new dimensions that we can eventually inhabit with others. In so doing, we not only remake the world but are ourselves remade.
Ibid
