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Chris Lavergne

4,399 Quotes
President of Thought.is
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4,399 quotes curated by Chris Lavergne:

“Is the truth best said or perhaps only said in a fiction; that is, in a lie and a falsehood? Perhaps the ghost was no ghost. Perhaps its truth, like the theater itself, was a lie.”
— Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine
Tagged: Truth
“I believe that software, and in fact entire companies, should be run in a way that assumes that the sum of the talent of people outside your walls is greater than the sum of the few you have inside. None of us are as smart as all of us.”
— Matt Mullenweg,
Tagged: Business, WordPress
“This technique is called marginalizing and is still frequently used, especially in organized reactions to media viruses. In order to generate public support for an illogical policy, leaders need to name and demonize an enemy, then whip up an emotional fury against the demon. Anyone remaining against the proposed policy needs to be minimalized, sidelined, or marginalized. This way people who oppose the public relations objectives are made to feel absolutely alone.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture
Tagged: Marginalization
“It is easy to criticize a sensationalist talk show for, say, giving a neo-Nazi a platform to voice hateful rhetoric. But by exposing these sorts of people rather than censoring them, these shows reveal the underlying inconsistencies in their doctrines. Instead of appearing frightening, these people’s platitudes appear as inane as they really are.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture
Tagged: Censorship, Exposure, Media
“The instinct for increased contact is the evolutionary imperative we feel to become something greater than ourselves. Just as atoms combined into molecules, molecules clustered into cells, and cells collected into organisms, we organisms are networking into greater levels of organization.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed
Tagged: Evolution, Media
“It calls to mind the questions posed back in the 1960s by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who had been fascinated by the impact of spectacle and authority on soldiers’ obedience in Nazi Germany. Milgram wanted to know if German war criminals could have been following orders, as they claimed, and not truly complicit in the death camp atrocities. At the very least, he was hoping to discover that Americans would not respond the same way under similar circumstances. He set up the now infamous experiment in which each subject was told by men in white lab coats to deliver increasingly intense electric shocks to a victim who screamed in pain, complained of a heart condition, and begged for the experiment to be halted. More than half of the subjects carried out the orders anyway, slowly increasing the electric shocks to what they believed were lethal voltages. On a structural level— and maybe also an emotional one— reality TV mirrors much of this same dynamic. No, we’re not literally shocking people, but we are enjoying the humiliation and degradation of the participants, from the safe distance of an electronic medium. The question is not how much deadly voltage can we apply, but how shamefully low can we go? Besides, the producers bear the real brunt of responsibility— just as the men in lab coats did in the research experiments.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Media, Reality TV
“Openness does not mean lack of organization, lack of principle, or lack of all resistance. For the human being, at least, it means quite the contrary: the strengthening of organization, principles, and resistance where needed, so that interaction with the outside can be strong and real. Indeed, paradoxically again, openness means strengthening closure itself.”
— Walter Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture
Tagged: Openness, Organization
“There is no substitute for working alongside someone in the trenches.”
— Matt Mullenweg, HBR.org
Tagged: strategy
“The engineer and historian of engineering Henry Petroski presents a very elegant point. Had the Titanic not had that famous accident, as fatal as it was, we would have kept building larger and larger ocean liners and the next disaster would have been even more tragic. So the people who perished were sacrificed for the greater good; they unarguably saved more lives than were lost.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Black Swan
Tagged: disaster, strategy