A few quotes from "Player One" by Douglas Coupland that I enjoyed (combined with an exploration of how I can export note from a Kindle app on an iPad): About artifacts and objects
Encountered at "Location 92" (Oh btw, given that I read the Kindle version of the book, I exported the note from kindle.amazon.com and got this weird new term that people in the future may refer to as the new version of pages):
"some kind of sin-detecting hand-held gadget lurking in his shirt pocket, lying in wait for Karen to undo more buttons or pick her nose or perform any other silly act that was formerly considered private, a silly act that will ultimately appear on a gag-photo website alongside JPEGs of baseball team portraits in which one member is actively vomiting, or on a movie site where teenagers, utterly unaware of the notion of cause and effect, jump from suburban rooftops onto trampolines, whereupon they die."
Location 869:
"he can’t believe the crap people used to put in their bodies in the twentieth century."
Location 3336 (it's awkward to think about the equivalent in a paper book: page 3336 feels like a vacation to a country with a devalued, say when you trade 10 millions against 5$):
"Dark-Age High Tech Technical sophistication is relative. In the eleventh century, people who made steps leading up to their hovel doors were probably mocked as being high tech early adopters."
Location ? (for some reasons I cannot get an excerpt's location when other people also highlighted it as relevant for their own purposes):
"Cash is a time crystal. Cash allows you to multiply your will, and it allows you to speed up time. Cash is what defines us as a species. Nothing else in the universe has money."
About space and place
Location 1065:
"An airport isn’t even a real place. It’s a pit stop, an in-between area, a “nowhere,” a technicality — a grudging intrusion into the seamless dream of transcontinental jet flight. Airports are where you go right after you’ve died and before you get shipped off to wherever you’re going next. They’re the present tense crystallized into aluminum, concrete, and bad lighting."
About "the future"
Location 1076:
"The future is not the same thing as Eternity. Eternity is everything and nothing. In the future, things that were already happening keep going on, but without you."
Location 1901:
"the thing about the future is that it’s full of things happening, whereas the present so often feels stale and dead. We dread the future but it’s what we have."
Location 1262:
"a clump of business cards so old they lacked area codes in front of the phone numbers. Even amidst the confusion, this absence of area codes struck Rachel as remarkable. Sometimes the events that mark the change from one era to another are so slow that they are invisible while they happen."
What we are as human
Location 1827:
"I think we’re everything: our brain’s wiring, the things our mothers ate when they were pregnant, the TV show we watched last night, the friend who betrayed us in grade ten, the way our parents punished us. These days we have PET scans, MRIs, gene mapping, and massive research into psychopharmacology — so many ways of explaining the human condition. Personality is more like a . . . a potato salad composed of your history plus all of your body’s quirks, good and bad."
Location 2001:
"Look at you all. You’re a depressing grab bag of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of the most banal form of capitalism. No seasons in your lives — merely industrial production cycles that rule you far better than any tyrant. You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well all be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they’re ever going to be."
Why do I blog this? As usual with Coupland's book, the vocabulary and the insights brought by his writing are compelling and strikingly pertinent to discuss current socio-technical trends. I find it useful to keep them up my sleeve just in case I need to exemplify certain topics in my presentation/teaching.