To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.

Paul R. Ehrlich

I resist what I cannot change
Own it in your own way
I wanna find what can't be found

Pain, The War on Drugs

The more perfectly, and even alertly, we clicked through our automatic affairs on the surface of things, the more complete was our insensibility to the utterly inscrutable mystery that anything should be in existence at all.

Alfred Noyes, The Unknown God

Life in the COVID-19 Age

The snare in which humanity has been caught is an economics—great industry and commerce in service to great markets, with ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures, including our own, having fallen away in eager deference to profitability....The prestige of what was until very lately the world economic order lingers on despite the fact that the system itself is now revealed as a tenuous set of arrangements that have been highly profitable for some people but gravely damaging to the world. 

Marilynne Robinson, What Kind of Country Do We Want? (NYRB)

The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving.

Jia Tolentino, as quoted in the New York Review by Jonathan Lethem

...You have to remember that there are seven and a half billion people on earth and only about fifteen hundred or so of them are billionaires.  There's a kind of penumbra of rich people—another few hundred thousand—and a twilight zone of merely affluent people whose standard of living and location is basically the extent of their wealth, a kind of geopolitical fortune rather than a bankable one, and then basically everyone else is as poor as hell.

Nick Harkaway, Gnomon

Ecology and evolution are deeply intertwined. Just as the death and decay of organisms provide raw materials for subsequent generations, so too the deaths of species spawn new possibilities for future generations of species. Without extinction, there would be insufficient ecological space for evolution to explore alternative solutions and diversify into new life forms. When initially faced with some change to their native environments, species don’t grimly stay put and evolve into new forms better suited to the transformed conditions. They move, tracking the old habitat. In general, it’s only when the old habitat disappears that species are forced to adapt or die. Mass extinctions—the dying off of multiple, distantly-related lineages over vast areas in a short span of time—occur when one or more external forces wipe out a range of habitats, cutting off opportunities for tracking habitats.  Over the past half-billion  years, there have been five major mass extinctions, with the dinosaurs wiped out in the most recent of these. We now face the sixth mass extinction, which threatens to tear apart the fabric of the biosphere, with drastic consequences for most life on this planet, including us. In better times, species losses tick along at a barely discernable rate—perhaps one every five years. At present, somewhere between 50 and 150 species disappear every day, never to be seen again.... This time around, a single species—Homo sapiens—has become the external force driving the decimation of millions of other species. Yes, we are the asteroid now colliding with the planet. 


Scott D. Sampson, Dismiss dinosaurs as failures...and pave a path to a bleak future

We're an information economy.... it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.  Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified...

William Gibson,  Johnny Mnemonic

Most people don’t like righteousness in others. They can be quite righteous about it.

Louis Menand, The New Yorker (January 8, 2018)

We are, as we have always been, dangerous creatures, the enemies of our own happiness. But the only help we have ever found for this, the only melioration, is in mutual reverence. God’s grace comes to us unmerited, the theologians say. But the grace we could extend to one another we consider it best to withhold in very many cases, presumptively, or in the absence of what we consider true or sufficient merit (we being more particular than God), or because few gracious acts, if they really deserve the name, would stand up to a cost-benefit analysis. This is not the consequence of a new atheism, or a systemic materialism that afflicts our age more than others. It is good old human meanness, which finds its terms and pretexts in every age. The best argument against human grandeur is the meagerness of our response to it, paradoxically enough.

Marilynne Robinson, New York Review (November , 2017)

These are the times we live in, in which men hide their truths, perhaps even from themselves, and live in lies, until the lies reveal those truths in ways impossible to foretell.

Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

The nation’s labor market continues to bifurcate, separating the workers lucky enough to get the high-skill jobs our economy has newly created (and get paid accordingly) from those stuck with jobs for which automation has taken away the need for skills and that therefore pay very little.

Benjamin M. Friedman, New York Review (October 12, 2017)

The urgent project at the moment isn’t adding more information to the cultural file; it is understanding how meaning is produced.

 

Nathan Heller, The New Yorker (July 24, 2017)

Modern media ... have always been based on the reselling of human attention to advertisers. 
 
Jacob Weisberg, The New York Review (October 27, 2016)

Today, not carrying a smartphone indicates eccentricity, social marginalization, or old age.


Jacob Weisberg, The New York Review (February 55, 2016)

[R]elying on the Internet for facts and figures is making us mindless sloths.... a study in Science ...  demonstrates that the wealth of information readily available on the Internet disinclines users from remembering what they’ve found out.


Sue Halpern, "How Robots & Algorithms Are Taking Over," New York Review (April 2, 2015)

My moment-by-moment happiness is pretty low, but my life satisfaction is great.

From The New York Review of Dec 4, 2014.

Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life.  That is its job.  Your job is to notice.


Michael Harris, as quoted by The Economist (August 16, 2014)

In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner.

Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Dimitrios

Having noted Chinese immobility, they gained a clearer sense of their own motion.  Their appreciation of individual initiative was enhanced as they noted that individuals in China could undertake only what society expected of them.  They grasped more sharply the strength of the human personality in the West by observing that the only recognized human entity in China was the collective.  They took the measure of the role of competition in their own country when they saw that no one in China could escape his assigned place, for to do so would offend against the established hierarchy.  They saw more clearly how important merchants were in Britain by observing how deeply they were scorned in China.  They became aware of their own devotion to the new by discovering the cult of the immutable.  In short, they gained a clearer insight into the fact that individualism, competition, and innovation were the wellsprings of their own wealth and power.

Alain Peyrefitte's observation, on the "failed" Macartney expedition to China 1792-94, in his masterful The Collision of Two Civilisations.