Dear Cyborgs Quotes

“So I think that a protest,' she went on, 'like a work of dance or a work of music, is something done, at least in part, by the protestor for the protestor.'
She saw I was about to interrupt so said, 'One more minute. Let me explain. Of course one hopes and plans for impact, for audience, for change, for efficacy. But, like dance, like music, a protest can be a religious ritual too, one that needn't be derisively looked down upon as magical thinking, but a spiritual act where the act itself is the goal. And that act may on some level be co-opted, but in the subjective world of the protestor it is a way, in itself, to be. Even in solipsism, the subject can be moral. You can call it hokum if you wish, but for the protestor, the protest makes a moral world in which she can abide.”
― Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs

“(Some seem unaccepting of this transformation, and it indeed has been gradual. In a sense it began when the first simple machines were invented. But now, to deny the change requires a willful ignorance since, if you observe bodies clothed in steel flowing over highways, or how we’ve outsourced half our memory to these devices, these exobrains we carry around, and if you note how even our most intimate relationships occur remotely, at great distances from one another, if you see all this, well, it isn’t such an original observation, dear cyborgs, to say that human and machine long ago merged inextricably.)”
― Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs

“I don’t think that art can change the world. But at least art can help us to unveil life.”
― Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs

“(When I say cyborgs, I of course mean us.)

...

(Some seem unaccepting in this transformation, and it indeed has been gradual. In a sense it began when the first simple machines were invented. But now, to deny the change requires a willful ignorance since, if you observe bodies clothed in steel flowing over highways, or how we've outsourced half our memory to these devices, these exobrains we carry around, and if you note how even our most intimate relationships occur remotely, at great distances from one another, if you see all this, well, it isn't such an original observation, dear cyborgs, to say that human and machine long ago merged inextricably.)”
― Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs

“This time it was true death we heard - oblivion, void, the absolute - and the beauty of the experience was rooted in our sadness in acknowledging living within it. That's what True Death would say. Not I'm coming for you but You always dwell within me.”
― Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs

“The problem is that history is not a dialectic progression but a biome, a swamp where ideas chase each other around and wallow and where drupelets of their larvae cluster and then hatch to devour siblings.”
― Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs

“It’s actually the same,” said Frank, stating the obvious, as if Muriel wasn’t aware, “as your digitized cafeteria. These types of places are a cousin to that technological development. Economies of unthinkably vast scale allow the production of cheap, unsubtle food that overrides your limbic system with heavy, carnal signals so as to hide its exact resemblance to slow-acting poison. And this so-called food is served to you by a member of an underclass practically invisible to you, untouchable by you, unspeakable to except perhaps to complain and unspeakable of except perhaps to yourself with subconscious and subvocalized disdain, and yet, almost needless to say, a person whose destiny could have been exchanged for your own but for capricious circumstance. And this meal, so-called, once placed on a tray for you to take to your seat, will be eaten within an almost indestructible yet disposable shelter composed of polyurethanes, petrochemicals, fiberglass, and the occasional piece of metal—restaurant castles, in other words, that rival geodesic domes in their modular, architectural ingeniousness.”
― Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs

“On the one side of the bus someone had spray painted: It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. ”
― Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs

“But now, to deny the change requires a wilful ignorance since, if you observe bodies clothed in steel flowing over highways, or how we’ve outsourced half our memory to these devices, these exobrains we carry around, and if you note how even our most intimate relationships occur remotely, at great distances from one another, if you see all this, well, it isn’t such an original observation, dear cyborgs, to say that human and machine long ago merged inextricably.”
― Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs

“In fact, all the comic-book shops in the world are really just one essential place, and their entrances but doors to a single coincidence. That’s why you always see there, no matter where you are, the same dreamy, awkward clients.”
― Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs