No world / wears as well as it should but, mortal or not, / a world still had to be built.

~Auden, “The Birth of Architecture”

What is mobile is always the most just.

~Robert Walser. So many great sentences in Walser. 📚

Every last silly little thing has its unspeakably swift justification, its good clever grounds.

~Robert Walser in 1907, writing about the Internet 📚

Jaron Lanier, being typically insightful:

“We have to say consciousness is a real thing and there is a mystical interiority to people that’s different from other stuff because if we don’t say people are special, how can we make a society or make technologies that serve people?”

The profile is titled, “The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane.” Which does certainly seem like a more likely possibility.

Then, in all labyrinthine economies

there are obscure nooks into which Authority never pokes a suspicious nose

~Auden, “The Horations”

What has become of us as a people that we can possess the beautiful only in dreams.

~Robert Walser

Currently reading: Berlin Stories by Robert Walser 📚

The cultivation of taste, in morals as well as in art, is neither snobbish nor elitist; it is, rather, the key means by which we emancipate ourselves from the tyranny of passions that the people who make our smartphone apps would like to see dominate us.

~Alan Jacobs, reflecting on David Hume & social media 🔗

I encountered a stunning book of photos on the Getty’s website today: Kazumasa Ogawa’s Some Japanese Flowers, from 1896.

19th-century photograph is always shocking & disorienting—how foreign, yet contemporary. 📚

Currently reading: The Battle for Your Brain by Nita A. Farahany 📚

Her contention is that control over our own inner life will become increasingly fraught in coming years, as advances in neurotech & pharma combine to create new ways of monitoring, interpreting, & responding to our brainwaves.

I’m only a couple chapters in, but she lays out so clearly how tech is building on-ramps to this surveillance—through gamification, virtual reality, & other developments that are pitched as innocuous & “free”.