Thaddeus

“Every innovation—technological, sociological, or otherwise—begins as a crusade, organizes itself into a practical business, and then, over time, degrades into common exploitation. This is simply the life cycle of how human ingenuity manifests in the material world. What goes forgotten, though, is that those who partake in this system undergo a similar transformation: people begin as comrades and fellow citizens, then become labor resources and assets, and then, as their utility shifts or degrades, transmute into liabilities, and thus must be appropriately managed. This is a fact of nature just as much as the currents of the winds and the seas. The flow of force and matter is a system, with laws and maturation patterns. We should harbor no guilt for complying with those laws—even if they sometimes require a little inhumanity. —TRIBUNO CANDIANO, LETTER TO THE COMPANY CANDIANO CHIEF OFFICER’S ASSEMBLY”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, Foundryside

“In the effort to understand, we may go too far in personalizing institutions, and even entire industries; we may forget that none of these things really exist. It is only individual human beings who have agendas—and these agendas are themselves complex expressions of political and personal drives, some unconscious. So long as institutions must be comprised of individuals, then, institutions will have fractures, gradients; they will be many things, and in combinations that will change over time. We speak and think in models. And so we say that “The New York Times” wants to accomplish this, or that “the CIA” is after that. So long as we recognize this as shorthand, necessary”
― Barrett Brown, My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous: A Memoir

“I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Ecotone. It means an in-between spot. Eco, like ecosystem. And tone, from tonos. That’s Greek. It means ‘tension.’ So it’s like the tension between ecosystems, you understand? The overlap between two worlds. Two worlds in conflict with each other. You see all that land behind us?” He pointed a thumb back at the soft rolling grassy hills. “That land wants to be prairie. But this here land in front of us, it wants to be forest. And this spot, this is where the prairie and the forest are fighting. And this little guy”—he brushed the baby elm gently with a finger—“he’s the advance guard. There’s a slow-motion war happening right here, Jack, beneath our feet, on a scale we can’t even imagine.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness