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Chris Lavergne

4,407 Quotes
President of Thought.is
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4,407 quotes curated by Chris Lavergne:

“Disdaining the wasteful, elitist space where bands hankered after record-company expense accounts that would pay for hookers and villas in the South of France, Silicon Valley presented itself as the tribune of average-Joe air guitarists who never got their shot at the American Dream. It was easy to stoke resentment against the perks enjoyed by the pros while spreading the easy gospel of democratic cultural production. Every boy and girl could be Virginia Woolf and Keith Richards and David Foster Wallace depending on what day of the week it was, thanks to fun new digital software that ushered in a freshly branded universe of frictionless self-gratification in which all movies and books and music would be free, because they should be free, because they were made to be free, because paying for stuff is an unconscionable rip-off in a world where stuff was meant to be free, and who else does art belong to if not to the people, right? And so, the tech moguls could pose as liberators and revolutionaries who would cut out the middlemen while sucking up the market cap of the music business, the newspaper business, and other sadly benighted industries. The paradoxical result of these acts of creative destruction has been the elevation of a handful of recording artists like Beyoncé, Kanye West, Katy Perry, and Justin Bieber to previously unseen levels of wealth and fame, in the same moment that the product on which their fame is, or was, based—namely, music—has been rendered worthless.”
— David Samuels, n+1
Tagged: Celeberity, celebrity, Fandom, Music
“So God has never been made. He has always been. Then slowly, with the increase of consciousness, when people discovered that they could make different ideas about the deity, they came to the conclusion that it was nothing but an idea, and they quite forgot the real phenomenon that is behind all the ideas. You see, they became so identical with the products of their own consciousness that they thought they had created him. But such abuse brings about its own revenge. The more people created ideas about God, the more they depleted and devitalized nature. And then it looked as if that primordial fact of the world had only taken place in imagination. Of course, be that process we created consciousness, but we have built up a thick wall between ourselves and primordial facts, between ourselves and the divine presence. We are so far away that nobody knows what one is talking about when one speaks of that divine presence, and if anybody discovers it suddenly, he thinks it is most amazing; yet it is the most simple fact. But we are no longer simple enough on account of that thick wall of ideas; we have so many preconceived ideas about what the divine presence ought to be, that we have deprived ourselves of the faculty of seeing it. Yet the primordial facts are still in the world; they happen all the time, only we have given them so many names that we don't see the wood any longer on account of the trees”
— Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939
Tagged: Consciousness, Theology
“It even crossed his mind, as he stood idly waiting, his hand resting on the wallpaper books, that maybe he ought to get a rifle. Why not? His father had taken him hunting as a boy; the memory rose in his mind with wonderful vividness— creeks, trees, sunlight, squirrels scampering along high, leafy branches, the sky bright blue, like the ceiling at his parents' church. He'd never been hunting since. Ellen had hated guns. Her irrational fear of them had gotten under his skin, her weird conviction— only now did he fully realize how weird it was— that Mickelsson was a man too dark-spirited and moody to be safe with a rifle in the house. He shook his head. Odd what a man could take for reasonable and natural, if the poison was slipped in subtly enough, over a long enough period of time.”
— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Relationships, Slowly Dying
“Why get hung up on what other people are doing if you go forward and work on what you think is best?”
— Larry Page, Digiday.com
Tagged: Work Strategies
“The question is whether the Ideal exists in actuality or only in our clumsy, moment-by-moment emotions— continually shifting potential; in other words 'out there' or 'in here' or both: God's voice, so to speak, or the opinion, on a particular Tuesday, of some human— or both at once. Am I leaving things out?”
— Peter Mickelsson, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Idealism, Ideals
“When they had fights about Ellen's playing around— a phrase that, inexplicably, filled him with rage— it always seemed later that it was not her infidelity that brought on the fights, nor his guilt at his own unconfessed infidelity, but the gin they'd drunk. It had seemed not in the real world, as real human beings, that they attacked each other, but as brightly painted puppet-like creatures in an eerie projection, a dream-world where blows (they had often come to blows— Mickelsson holding back, doing damage enough, Ellen laying in on him with everything she had, pitifully girlish, though sometimes he came out with a puffy face) had no force, whatever their violence, and words, whatever their viciousness, would prove hard to remember later. In the morning they would be careful of each other, as of people who've been wounded and will never again be whole.”
— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Relationships
“We are reaching deep within ourselves to adjust the master knob. We are messing with our source code, including the code that grows our brains and makes our minds. Gene splicing, genetic engineering, and gene therapy have given our minds direct control of our genes, ending a four-billion-year hegemony of Darwinian evolution. Now the inheritance of acquired and desirable traits in human lines is possible. The technium will be completely liberated from the tyranny of slow-moving DNA. The consequences of this new symbiotic evolution are so immense that they silence us.”
— Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
Tagged: Evolution, Technology
“About 2,500 years ago most of humanity's major religions were set in motion in a relatively compact period. Confucius, Lao-tzu, Buddha, Zoroaster, the authors of the Upanishads, and the Jewish patriarchs all lived within a span of 20 generations. Only a few major religions have been born since then. Historians call that planetary fluttering the Axial Age. It was as if everyone alive awoke simultaneously and, in one breath, set out in search of their mysterious origins. Some anthropologists believe the Axial Age awakening was induced by the surplus abundance that agriculture created, enabled by massive irrigation and waterworks around the world. It would not surprise me if we saw another axial awakening someday, powered by another flood of technology.”
— Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
Tagged: Axial Age, Technology, Theology
“He'd never in his life heard music so unearthly. Perhaps it was the shale of the mountainsides, or the breath of cold fog on the river; whatever the reason, the music, by the time it reached Mickelsson, seemed nothing that human voices could conceivably produce. If stones were to sing, taking their own natural harmonies, or if the restless spirits of dead animals were to cry out, this might be their sound.”
— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Music, Theology, Perfect Music
“In a world where everything is declining, you have instances of digital outlets growing. But relatively speaking, they in no way begin to replace what was there before. Even the Huffington Post. I think maybe they have revenue of $60 million. That's as opposed to what's gone away: the Washington Post has gone from billions to I don't know what. And it's been replaced by Politico, which is maybe a $20 million business.”
— Michael Wolff, Digiday.com
Tagged: Digital media