CUNNING PLANS Quotes

“Act like you live in the Science Fiction Condition. Act like you can do magic and hold séances for the future and build a brightness control for the sky. Act like you live in a place where you could walk into space if you wanted. Think big. And then make it better.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“Aleister Crowley told a friend he could make any random fall over without touching them. To illustrate, he walked behind a stranger for a block or so, matching his footsteps precisely to the stranger’s. He then scuffed his heels, as if stumbling and falling. And the stranger fell over. The stranger had heard himself fall, and so he fell. If Facebook tells you that everything around you is sad and depressing often enough, you get sad and depressed. All hail the Great Beast 666 of black marketing.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“Prediction is the best circus act of all. But it is just an act. It’s a carny turn. Stop doing it.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“Look at a Segway and tell me it’s not the world’s shittiest witch’s broomstick. We only wanted jetpacks because we couldn’t make magic carpets work.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“The near future? Pop will go down into the tube station at midnight and have sex. Lots of sex. And all those genres I listed earlier? Every single year will generate a list of new genres like that. Then every six months. Then every month. Then every week. Pop will fuck and mutate and survive. The new sounds will be everywhere, in too many places for us to notice them all at once. A million glorious bursts of incoherent noise.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“The near future? The future of anything is like some massive weather system on the horizon, pushing out thunderheads all over the place, and it’s impossible to predict where the lightning will strike. And in 2011 it’s worse than ever.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“Ballardian banality comes from not getting the future that we were promised, or getting it too late to make the promised difference.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“There are people out there so heavily specialized in wearable technology that they call shirts with networked devices built into them “wearable shirts.” They’re so deep into their own silo of futurism that they’ve forgotten how shirts work.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“Whenever I find myself somehow fooled into doing one of these talks, it’s on the grounds that some confused soul thinks that I will talk about the digital world and the future. What always happens is that I rant for an unspecified length of time about obscure history and fringe beliefs. So you need to understand that you are now trapped in this room with me and I’ve already been paid. This is my cunning plan.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“What Mogo did was to take ultimate action to improve his quality of life. This is at the root of murder. We kill people to make our own lives better. We kill them because they are obstacles to our desires, because they make us unhappy, because they burden us, or because they keep calling us fucking wizards. Murder increases happiness.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“The most basic mobile phone is in fact a communications devices that shames all of science fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators. Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator and it couldn’t text or take a photo that he could stick a nice Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“ADDENDUM: SOMETIMES THE FUTURE IS BULLSHIT”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“We are as gods on our little rock in the vast bleak cosmos and it’s way past time we started getting good at that instead of just posing on Olympus and photoshopping our zits out. The future is more than an Instagram filter.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“Bloody Wolf Blitzer intoning that a weather bomb is going to detonate over America because the planet hates humans and time is a flat circle.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“There are no good futures. There’s nothing to head towards but more garish, unsustainable carnival acts.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“Psalm 111:10. The fear of God. The awe and dread of all that spooky action at a distance. And the Devil was understood to be less an adversary than a particularly evil employee of God. He was that bastard in the Human Resources Department who looks for ways to screw with your life. Satan was real. And he wandered around each day with an eye out for opportunities to tempt ordinary people into sinning. And God allowed it. There was presumably a housing crisis in Heaven or something, and he let Satan roam the earth, tricking people out of their renting privileges in the afterlife.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“I’d love to be able to tell you a story about the future, but I’d rather tell you a story that counts. I’d rather give you a sense of where you might come from, because you need to know where you’ve been to know where to go. The future is your story to tell. And maybe you have more options for the future than you thought. Maybe there are different ways to see what comes next. Wear your iron goggles and walk down Dark Lane at night to see what you can see. Stand by the weir and look at the river of time. Understand that you are part of something very old and yet constantly renewed. And that you may think you can forget history, but history will certainly not forget you. We all need a cunning plan. So be cunning.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“In the world of haunted machines we’re determined to bring on, we need alchemists. People with feet in both worlds. People prepared to consider a world of ghosts and spirits with presence and agency. People like the cunning-folk, equipped to translate the high code of that world for the rest of us dung-stained villagers. People who know their history – which means also knowing their folklore, because that’s where the lessons are. Magic”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards. That, by the way, is what Steve Jobs meant when he said that iPads were magical. The central metaphor is magic. And perhaps magic seems an odd thing to bring up here, but magic and fiction are deeply entangled, and you are all now present at a séance for the future. We are summoning it into the present. It’s here right now. It’s in the room with us. We live in the future. We live in the Science Fiction Condition, where we can see under atoms and across the world and across the methane lakes of Titan.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“the future is a product, and you only get to vote with your money now,”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“In league with the fantastic. That’s a thought to keep hold of.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. The present is always invisible because it’s environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone is alive in an earlier day.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“We hold up iPhones and, if we’re relatively conscious of history, we point out that this is an amazing device that contains a live map of the world and the biggest libraries imaginable and that it’s an absolute paradigm shift in personal communication and empowerment. And then some knob says that it looks like something from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and then someone else says that it doesn’t even look as cool as Captain Kirk’s communicator in the original and then someone else says no but you can buy a case for it to make it look like one and you’re off to the manufactured normalcy races, where nobody wins because everyone goes to fucking sleep.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“Welcome to JG Ballard’s future, fast becoming a consensus of its own, wherein the future is intrinsically banal. It is, essentially, the sensible position to take right now.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“There’s a workaround for encroaching phone stupidity. The first thing I did when I got to my place in Austin – an apartment rented for three days over the internet – was connect the thing to wifi. Just like that, my secondary brain got all its little grey cells back. The next few days were all about scurrying from wifi field to field, trying to keep the thing on life support. It’s a workaround. We live in a workaround culture. You have to jiggle the key in the ignition just right to start the car. You have to hold the TV remote at a certain angle. You know how it goes.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“We only wanted jetpacks because we couldn’t make magic carpets work.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“If Albert Einstein, the last century’s very poster boy for the cunning man and the wild-haired magician of science, knew one thing, then it was simply that there was always more to be known. He didn’t pridefully condemn dreams of physics and incomplete theories. He pointed off into the future and named the unknown things as, in fact, spooky action at a distance.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis

“In his other hand is a spear made from duct tape, a smashed Nokia phone from 1998 and a selfie stick. Welcome to the future.”
― Warren Ellis, CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis