Last Tango in Cyberspace Quotes

“the failure of language.” “It’s a creative destruction. Out of that failure comes culture. Out of culture comes desire. Out of desire come products.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“THIS REVOLUTION IS FOR DISPLAY PURPOSES ONLY.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code. It’s wired into every stage of meaning-making, from basic emotions all the way up to abstract thought. Once you can speak a language, you can feel in that language. It’s automatic. It creates empathy.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“You can’t scrub everything,” says Lorenzo. “Information gets what it wants, and it wants to be free.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“Emoticons as a new class of oversignifying precision grammar.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“Rilke knew what was up. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, one distant day, live right into the answer. What’s truer than that...”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“Flirting has to be the original form of guerrilla marketing, from back before markets even existed.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“Buckminster Fuller said don’t try to change human behavior. It’s s a waste of time. Evolution doesn’t mess around; the patterns are too deep. Fuller said go after the tools. Better tools lead to better people. Arctic doesn’t develop products. We may cultivate them, occasionally, in our own particular way, but our business is change. Significant change.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“Shifting culture requires a confluence of inciting incidents. Something directional that leads to a tribal fracturing and reknitting. Often shows up in language first. In music. Fashion. It can feel a little like hope.” He points at the images. “This doesn’t feel like hope.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“The early researchers described em-tracking as a hardware upgrade for the nervous system, maybe the result of a genetic shift, possibly a fast adaptation, Studies revealed an assortment of cognitive improvements: acute perceptual sensitivity, rapid data acquisition, high speed pattern recognition. The biggest change was in future prediction. Normally, the human brain is a selfish prognosticator, built to trace an individual’s path into the future. The em-tracker’s brain offers a wider oracle, capable of following a whole culture’s path into the future.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“Lion was the one who pointed out that naming hotels after Millennial values -- the Truth, the Purpose, the Community -- now that his generation had reached the age where the luxury of billboard ethics had been derailed by the verities of life, might be lucrative. "Aspirational nostalgia," he dubbed it.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“No one wants distortion, but choosing itself is the distortion.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“He’d uncovered one of the early subcult melds, the first internet generation to carve their identity from a global menu of counterculture. Style-wise, they borrowed saggy hip-hop gear from West Coast rappers, cartoonish Gyaru makeup from the Japanese cosplay scene, and angular Emo hairstyles from the Washington, DC, post-hard-core crowd. Their attitudes crossed anything-goes California bisexuality with edgy Brit-punk sneer, a combination that led to a completely novel form of rebellion: wet-kissing strangers on the street.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“Perhaps you will live along some distant day into the answer”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“All you can do is your inch. We grab everyone we can carry, put each other onto our backs, and crawl toward the future. Inch by inch—it’s all we can do.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“We ache for this feeling, but it’s everywhere. Booze, drugs, sex, sport, art, prayer, music, meditation, virtual reality. Kids, hyperventilating, spinning in circles, feel oneness. Why William James called it the basic lesson of expanded consciousness—just tweak a few knobs and levers in the brain and bam. So the drop, the comedown, it’s not that we miss oneness once it’s gone; it’s that we suddenly can’t feel what we actually know is there. Phantom limb syndrome for the soul.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“Words are too recent an imprinting. Animals, though, are part of our ancient grammar, prehistorically embedded in the brain.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“what is genuine emotion and what is business strategy. The modern condition.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“His em-tracking machinery is driven by words more than images, but that’s only his make and model. Empathy is related to intuition, and intuition is individually customized, tuned to dominant talents. Chefs need tastes, painters images. His experience is biblical: It starts with logos.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“But, seriously, when in history did fear of death ever come between a man and his drugs?”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“So I'm heading for Truth or Consequences."

"Aren't we all," says Lorenzo, "aren't we all.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“Lots of people believe consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, like space and time. If that's the case, then it is turtles all the way down. We'll have this debate about our microbiome. About rocks and atoms and quarks. Until we have Gaia consciousness, there will always be an us-them divide, always a next frontier for empathy.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“The flavor is surprisingly poly-tribe, which is new slang for the global mash-up, the hybridization of signs, styles, and meanings that is somehow now: Liberty International Airport, Newark, New Jersey.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“Their attitudes crossed anything-goes California bi-sexuality with edgy Brit-punk sneer, a combination that led to a completely novel form of rebellion: Wet-kissing strangers on the street.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“secure base.” Out of Bowlby’s attachment theory.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“Penelope standing with her back to him, the joint’s ember like a comet caught between her fingers.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“Pitch black again. Like someone extinguished an angel.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“I rap for the trees...for the trees have no tongues.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace

“Lion glances back at the pigeons. Sees a flicker he didn’t notice before. Remembers that the de-extinction program was a failed effort, realizes he’s looking at a light-vert. An AR projection of an almost. The bad dreams of a society disguised as a good time.”
― Steven Kotler, Last Tango in Cyberspace