Readings

“I sustain myself on the puppet drug of personal technology. Every touch of a button brings the neural rush of finding something I never knew and never needed to know until it appears at my anxious fingertips, where it remains for a shaky second before disappearing forever.”

a character in Zero K
by Don DeLillo

Do our machines (and our abstractions) measure what we become,
or do we become what our machines measure?

"An English speaker who describes a friend as aggressive will be reluctant to describe the same person as kind for that would imply that the friend possessed inconsistent traits.  Mandarin speakers do not detect an inconsistency when they say that a person teases her friends but lends them money because they do not use the abstract terms aggressive and kind."

Jerome Kagan
On Being Human: Why Mind Matters