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"The phenomenon of large- and medium-scale collaborations among individuals that are organised without markets or managerial hierarchies is emerging everywhere in the information and cultural production system. The question is how we should understand these instances of socially productive behaviour: What are the dynamics that make them possible and successful, and how should we think about their economic value?"

Yochai Benkler, Coarse's Penguin

"The fact that men use the language that flows from knowledge proves nothing; for even men under the influence of these passions utter scientific proofs and verses of Empedocles, and those who have just begun to learn a science can string together its phrases, but do not yet know it; for it has to become part of themselves, and that takes time; so that we must suppose that the use of language by men in an incontinent state means no more than its utterance by actors on the stage."

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

"If money is the bond which ties me to human life and society to me, which links me to nature and to man, is money not the bond of all bonds? Can it not bind and loose all bonds? Is it therefore not the universal means of separation? It is the true agent of separation and the true cementing agent, it is the chemical power of society.”

Karl Marx

“The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.”

Keith Hart, The Memory Bank

"To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt."

Mikhail Bakunin

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

Herbert A. Simon, 1971

"Indeed, in a study of two hundred artists eighteen years after they left art school, Csikszentmihalyi found that it was those who in their student days had savored the sheer joy of painting itself who had become serious painters. Those who had been motivated in art school by dreams of fame and wealth for the most part drifted away from art after graduating."

Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence

"Over the years, I have come to understand that the basic premise behind the [Anarchist Cookbook] is profoundly flawed. The anger that motivated the writing of the Cookbook blinded me to the illogical notion that violence can be used to prevent violence. I had fallen for the same irrational pattern of thought that led to US military involvement in both Vietnam and Iraq. The irony is not lost on me."

William Powell, The Guardian

According to one famous Hindu myth, two gods, the brothers Kartikeya and Ganesha, had a quarrel over who should be the first to marry. Their mother Parvati suggested a contest: the winner would be the one to most quickly circle the entire universe. Kartikeya set off on the back of a giant peacock. It took him three years to transverse the limits of the cosmos. Ganesha bided his time, then, finally, walked in a circle around his mother, remarking, 'You are the universe to me.'

David Graeber, Debt

Moondog's music took its inspiration from street sounds, such as the subway or a foghorn. It tended to be relatively simple but characterized by what he called "snaketime" and described as "a slithery rhythm, in times that are not ordinary [...] I'm not gonna die in 4/4 time.""

Wikipedia, Moondog

"In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord, the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist."

Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847)

"[Philip K Dick's] political awareness was not so much undeveloped as developed to a point where he fully recognized the futility of politics. Instead he focused on human decency, as expressed through empathy and sacrifice."

American Thinker, Philip K. Dick and Our Predicament

‎Zerzan's theories draw on Theodor Adorno's concept of negative dialectics to construct a theory of civilization as the cumulative construction of alienation. According to Zerzan, original human societies in paleolithic times, and similar societies today such as the !Kung, Bushmen and Mbuti, live a non-alienated and non-oppressive form of life based on primitive abundance and closeness to nature. Constructing such societies as a kind of political ideal, or at least an instructive comparison against which to denounce contemporary (especially industrial) societies, Zerzan uses anthropological studies from such societies as the basis for a wide-ranging critique of aspects of modern life. He portrays contemporary society as a world of misery built on the psychological production of a sense of scarcity and lack. The history of civilization is the history of renunciation; what stands against this is not progress but rather the Utopia which arises from its negation.

Wikipedia, John Zerzan

Enfin je me rappelai le pis-aller d’une grande princesse à qui l’on disait que les paysans n’avaient pas de pain, et qui répondit : Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.

Rousseau, Confessions

The concept of alienation is deeply embedded in all the great religions and social and political theories of the civilised epoch, namely, the idea that some time in the past people lived in harmony, and then there was some kind of rupture which left people feeling like foreigners in the world, but some time in the future this alienation would be overcome and humanity would again live in harmony with itself and Nature.

Encylcopedia of Marxism, Alienation

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) had sketched a communist society, but this was a jeu d’esprit, written in Latin, the language of the intellectual elite. Winstanley’s pamphlets were published in the vernacular, at the height of the great revolution, and they aimed at rousing the poorer classes to political action. Winstanley himself took the lead in establishing a communist colony, which he hoped would be widely imitated. So neither Russia nor Germany nor France but England gave the world its first communist political programme.

Christopher Hill, Winstanley: The Law of Freedom

I probably said that a long time ago, probably ten years ago or something. I think cinema is different, or what was thought of as cinema has changed. It’s exploding. This idea of narrative filmmaking at ninety minutes to two hours, or stories with a beginning, middle, and end – I think it’s over with, it’s been destroyed. It’s been obliterated, it’s been spat upon, kicked in the gutter. Somebody’s been shitting on it for years, now. I feel like movies are going to be more like moods, like moments, something that is just made and watched and felt. I don’t necessarily think it has to have some kind of ridiculous deeper meaning.

Harmony Korine

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