46
" There was a time we laughed at the old guys up on the hill. The ones who graduated a couple of years before us, and who would hang around the school and the ballpark still, and would sit on the hoods of their cars and tell us how when they were seniors they did it better, faster, and further. We laughed, because we were still doing it, and all they could do was talk. If our goals were not met, there was next year, but it never occurred to us that one day there would not be a next year, and that the guys sitting on the hoods of their cars at the top of the hill, wishing they could have one more year, willing to settle for one last game, could one day be us. "
― Tucker Elliot
54
" Cheese runners shouted at it, tried to grab it, and flailed at it with sticks, but the piratical cheese scythed onward, reaching the bottom just ahead of the terrible carnage of men and cheeses as they piled up. Then it rolled back to the top and sat there demurely while still gently vibrating.
At the bottom of the slope, fights were breaking out among the cheese jockeys who were still capable of punching somebody, and since everybody was watching that, Tiffany took the opportunity to snatch up Horace and shove him in her bag. After all, he was hers. Well, that was to say she had made him, although something odd must have gone into the mix since Horace was the only cheese that would eat mice and, if you didn't nail him down, other cheeses as well. "
― Terry Pratchett , I Shall Wear Midnight (Discworld, #38; Tiffany Aching, #4)
55
" ... there was one new metallic monstrosity stacked in one corner that she hadn’t seen the last time she was a visitor to his strange chamber, it appeared to be a mass of hard drives all fused together, but they looked too sophisticated to be merely hard drives.
“What on earth is that?”
“That’s my Kung Fu,” he said proudly, patting the top of the futuristic-looking stack.
“Is that what you wanted to show me?”
“No, but it’s impressive, isn’t it?”
“If you say so.”
Steves sighed and shook his head, so few people could appreciate the intellectual complexity of an almost untraceable hacking device. "
― E.A. Bucchianeri , Brushstrokes of a Gadfly, (Gadfly Saga, #1)
59
" The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book.The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as " the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them.The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available. "