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Yes, I know, I am a witch and I traffic in dark magic.
Corpses are natural and inevitable citizens of the uncanny valley, the place where what is not alive too closely follows the pattern of what is.
The philosophical argument the System advances in its own favour—safety and empowerment in exchange for total personal transparency—did not persuade her. Quite apparently, she saw an irreducible virtue in the right to be unobserved.
There is no silence into which the lonely fall. The System is quite genuinely interested in everyone.
the digital Go master is not a machine at all, but a simulated person whose consciousness only extends to Go.
he’s part of that American culture of exercise where they apparently “come from yes.” I think that he wakes in the morning and does a hundred push-ups, drinks a cucumber and seagrass shake with added bull semen and then goes for a quick marathon, and fuck you, Pheidippides, because that’s his warm-up.
It had never occurred to me that a riot was a community, but it is.
Or maybe the Orphic wanderers have it right, and the different gods are but aspects of one vast and incomprehensible thing that exists so far beyond us that we have not the means to describe it, save by this accretion of divine surfaces. Perhaps God is an object with an infinite number of faces only a limited few of which can be viewed from a single point, but each of which may view us from all sides at once.
Turnpike Trust
art is never pure and commerce, like mortality, is uncompromising in its adherence to schedules.
The Emperor should have taken counsel from those founding fathers of America, who knew that the sacrifice of freedom for security is a devil’s compact.
No, once you’re in the chamber, there are no walls you can build that are high enough to keep the machine out. If necessary it becomes your substrate, carries the burden of beating your heart and filling your lungs. The machine will kill you and keep you alive while it fixes you. That’s the way it is.
Questions that trouble the mind are the only ones worth considering.
She recalls what it was to feel her brain shut down, to lose not only sensation but cognition, to see text become nonsense between one breath and the next.
