The Actual Star Quotes

“The Cortada The cave began as nothing more than a softness. As the water pooled, the softness became a depression, the depression a cut, the cut a passage, the passage a cavern, and the cavern a world. In the time of the Maya, that world was the realm of the gods. In the time of Saint Leah, that world was a tourist attraction. In our time, I propose, that world may be most rightly understood as a theatre of the soul.”
― Monica Byrne, The Actual Star

“I want to draw especial attention to the treatment of AI—artificial intelligence—in these narratives. Think of Ex Machina or Blade Runner. I spoke at TED two years in a row, and one year, there were back-to-back talks about whether or not AI was going to evolve out of control and “kill us all.” I realized that that scenario is just something I have never been afraid of. And at the same moment, I noticed that the people who are terrified of machine super-intelligence are almost exclusively white men. I don’t think anxiety about AI is really about AI at all. I think it’s certain white men’s displaced anxiety upon realizing that women and people of color have, and have always had, sentience, and are beginning to act on it on scales that they’re unprepared for. There’s a reason that AI is almost exclusively gendered as female, in fiction and in life. There’s a reason they’re almost exclusively in service positions, in fiction and in life. I’m not worried about how we’re going to treat AI some distant day, I’m worried about how we treat other humans, now, today, all over the world, far worse than anything that’s depicted in AI movies. It matters that still, the vast majority of science fiction narratives that appear in popular culture are imagined by, written by, directed by, and funded by white men who interpret the crumbling of their world as the crumbling of the world.”
― Monica Byrne, The Actual Star

“Shared fear is the only thing that guards norms of behavior.”
― Monica Byrne, The Actual Star

“Oh!” Daveed nodded, folding the new information into her growing brain.”
― Monica Byrne, The Actual Star

“In a long strange moment that seemed to draw away from her in all directions, she became aware of the separation of her thoughts like dewdrops on a spider’s thread: the impulse, the act, the memory, the meaning, and the imposition of the meaning upon the memory. There’d been a moment when they were all one and the same, she felt sure; but it was already past.”
― Monica Byrne, The Actual Star

“As if there hadn’t once been billions of people living in incomprehensible indignity enforced by psychotic hoarders.”
― Monica Byrne, The Actual Star

“was rising, due east. A turtledove landed in one of the cubbies and startled Niloux out of thought. It was a real bird, not an aug messenger. The dove turned to the mountains and began to sing. Her ai translated: The poet is too near The poet is too near Eggs in the sky It flew off.”
― Monica Byrne, The Actual Star

“That’s the opposite of what utopia means. Utopia is an ideal. Our world is a communist—” “Communist? Who told you that?” Niloux laughed. She couldn’t help herself, even though she knew the argument was getting ugly, and was aware of children watching. She put her finger down on the table to emphasize each word. “Our world is a pacifist, nomadic, subsidiarist, anarchist gift economy that evolved in response to rapid, catastrophic climate change.”
― Monica Byrne, The Actual Star