Nexus Quotes

We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

Yet suppose further. Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met at a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. And within it, a stairway, perhaps rising to the Godhead itself. Would you dare climb to the top, gunslinger? Could it be that somewhere above all of endless reality, there exists a room?...' You dare not.' And in the gunslinger's mind, those words echoed: You dare not.

There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain. I was in the car. And I was glad of it. Between one point on the map and another point on the map, there was the being alone in the car in the rain. They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for then you aren't you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow of the motor under your foot spinning that frail thread of sound out of its metal guy like a spider, that filament, that nexus, which isn't really there, between the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be where you get to the other place.

She thought of the boy's features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns-endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus.

Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.

What I really hoped for, no doubt, was to come upon one of those lives which begin nowhere, which lead us through marshes and salt flats, trickling away, seemingly without plan, purpose or goal, and suddenly emerge, gushing like geysers, and never cease gushing, even in death.

Here is the nexus of where work, gender, marriage, and money collide: Dependency.

The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.

It was you, you who brought me the pardon. Pee on me, won't you. It would be like benediction. O, what a sleepwalker I have been!

We’re all born dying, someone had said. What matters is only how we spend the instant we’re given.

The world has a very serious problem, my friend' Shiva went on. 'Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich -- like me -- live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we're pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though...

Grace is at the nexus of love and awareness. There it’s all open and it’s all love.

The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or AI but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that were supposed to bring love and joy but occasionally ended up flooding the world with blood.

Rena?” I looked up as a figure emerged from the white void of snowfall. The snow dusted his broad shoulders as he took long, measured strides toward me, his black coat flapping in the wind. As he neared, I made out his startled features. “Wallace?” His gaze burned with indiscernible emotion. “Are you hugging the lamp post?

Cause and effect are never divided between two people.

Do you think that a billion people knowing your face makes you special? It doesn't.

This beauty would remain whether he was here to see it or not.

When a situation gets so bad that no solution seems possible there is left only murder and suicide, or both. These failing, one becomes a buffoon.

God is a random event, a nexus of pain and pleasure and making and breaking.

To understand the future course of this war, one need only look at the history of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. Like those two manufactured "wars", this one will be never-ending, freedom-destroying, counterproductive, and ultimately understood to have caused far more damage than the supposed threat it was aimed at ever could have.

Wake up to reality! Nothing ever goes as planned in this accursed world. The longer you live, the more you realize that the only things that truly exist in this reality are merely pain. suffering and futility. Listen, everywhere you look in this world, wherever there is light, there will always be shadows to be found as well. As long as there is a concept of victors, the vanquished will also exist. The selfish intent of wanting to preserve peace, initiates war. and hatred is born in order to protect love. There are nexuses causal relationships that cannot be separated.

I don’t want to be a hungry soul just for a season. I want to live hunger. This is what draws me to Him. This is what fills every single bitter circumstance with the opportunity to know Him more. This is what brings me to the sweetness of His presence. And hope happens here at this nexus of bitter and sweet.

Well, why not just snap my damn olive branch and beat me with it? I was only trying to help.

Debt . . . . that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force.

Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met in a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower.

All roads led to her. She was the nexus of all connections his brain made - the wheel's hub

We think of ourselves as individuals, but all that we have accomplished, and all that we will accomplish, is the result of groups of humans cooperating. Those groups are organisms in their own rights.

Yet suppose further. Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met in a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. A stairway, perhaps, to the Godhead itself. Would you dare, gunslinger? Could it be that somewhere above all of endless reality, there exists a Room...? You dare not." You dare not. "Someone has dared," the gunslinger said. "Who would that be?" "God," the gunslinger said softly. His eyes gleamed. "God has dared...or is the room empty, seer?

To identify a person as a Southerner suggests not only that her history is inescapable and formative but that it is also impossibly present. Southerners live uneasily at the nexus between myth and reality, watching the mishmash amalgam of sorrow, humility, honor, graciousness, and renegade defiance play out against a backdrop of profligate physical beauty.

In order to cooperate, Sapiens no longer had to know each other personally; they just had to know the same story.

Man has been placed on that summit where he contains within him the source of self-impulsion toward good and evil in equal measure; the nexus of the principles within him is not a bond of necessity but of freedom. He stands at the dividing line; whatever he chooses will be his act, but he cannot remain in indecision because God must necessarily reveal himself and because nothing at all in creation can remain ambiguous.

From the time you wake up until the moment you go to bed it’s all a lie, all a sham and a swindle. Everybody knows it, and everybody collaborates in the perpetuation of the hoax. That’s why we look so goddamned disgusting to one another.

Capitalism, far from affording "privileges" to the middle classes, tends to degrade them more abjectly than any other stratum in society. The system deploys its capacity for abundance to bring the petty bourgeois into complicity with his own oppression—first by turning him into a commodity, into an object for sale in the marketplace; next by assimilating his very wants to the commodity nexus. Tyrannized as he is by every vicissitude of bourgeois society, the whole personality of the petty bourgeois vibrates with insecurity. His soporifics—commodities and more commodities—are his very poison. In this sense there is nothing more oppressive than "privilege" today, for the deepest recesses of the "privileged" man's psyche are fair game for exploitation and domination.

I mean, that was the code, wasn’t it? Single girls and taken guys weren’t allowed to be friends. The leash always got in the way.

Life's a witch and then you fly.

History isn’t the study of the past; it is the study of change. History teaches us what remains the same, what changes, and how things change.

One second she’s all timid, and then reeoowr! Hellcat.

Brainstorming is the nexus of ideas.

Buddhism suits me 'cuz nobody's in charge. Nobody's decidin' for me if I'm good or bad, goin' to heaven or hell. It's just me workin' on my head, you workin' your head, the friggin' Dalai Lama workin' on his head.

Balanced atop the highest spire of the Salt Lake Temple, gleaming in the Utah sun, a statue of the angel Moroni stands watch over downtown Salt Lake City with his golden trumpet raised. This massive granite edifice is the spiritual and temporal nexus of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which presents itself as the world's only true religion. Temple Square is to Mormons what the Vatican is to Catholics, or the Kaaba in Mecca is to Muslims. At last count there were more than eleven million Saints the world over, and Mormonism is the fastest-growing faith in the Western Hemisphere. At present in the United States there are more Mormons than Presbyterians or Episcopalians. On the planet as a whole, there are now more Mormons than Jews. Mormonism is considered in some sober academic circles to be well on its way to becoming a major world religion--the first such faith to emerge since Islam.

If I wasn’t born, what am I doing here?’ ‘You’re an independent temporal nexus, chronosynclastically established as an inverse...’ He saw her expression, and stopped. ‘You’re telling me it’s timey-wimey, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ he said seriously. ‘I suppose I am.

Don't pull on superman's cape unless you have kriptonite in your front pocket.

who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss stares also into you.

Knives and bombs do not themselves decide whom to kill. They are dumb tools, lacking the intelligence necessary to process information and make independent decisions. In contrast, AI can process information by itself, and thereby replace humans in decision making. AI isn’t a tool—it’s an agent.

Nexus I wrote stubbornly into the evening. At the window, a giant praying mantis rubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass, begging vacantly with pale eyes; and the commas leapt at me like worms or miniature scythes blackened with age. the praying mantis screeched louder, his ragged jaws opening into formlessness. I walked outside; the grass hissed at my heels. Up ahead in the lapping darkness he wobbled, magnified and absurdly green, a brontosaurus, a poet.

From its founding, America has stood at the nexus of democracy and oligarchy. And as soon as the nation was established, its history of conflating class and race gave an elite the language to take over the government and undermine democracy.

If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex)… Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be.

It doesn’t matter what’s wrong with him. We’re not going to act like he doesn’t exist. Not anymore.

Keep your spirits up, for the demons are scared of salvation.

Why are we so good at accumulating more information and power, but far less successful at acquiring wisdom?

The development of an informal public life depends people finding and enjoying one another outside the cash nexus.

All contemporary computation stems from this nexus: military attempts to predict and control the weather, and thus to control the future.

But Nita had always seen having a child as selfish. Why bring another soul into this world, she'd say, when there are so many out there that need our help?

If there is a single person at the nexus of fantasy literature, it is Terri Windling -- as editor, as writer, as painter, as muse.

It did something to the temporal lobe, one of the circuits involved in religious experience. It was supposed to put people closer to God. It did that. It also made them slaves.

The anxiety of anger and other “negative” emotions like sadness and rejection may become deeply bound in the body. Eventually it is transmuted into biological changes through the multiple and infinitely subtle cross-connections of the PNI apparatus, the unifying nexus of body/mind. This is the route that leads to organic disease. When anger is disarmed, so is the immune system. Or when the aggressive energy of anger is diverted inward, the immune system becomes confused. Our physiological defences no longer protect us or may even turn mutinous, attacking the body.

KITTSCHER: There’s a theory that all magic is essentially demonic, that every ritual both summons and binds a demon’s powers. Have you never wondered why magic takes such a toll? Our brushes with the uncanny are encounters with these parasitic forces. The demon is feeding even if its powers are contained. The bigger the magic, the more powerful the demon. And the nexuses are little more than doorways through which demons may, for a brief time, pass. NOWNES: What you suggest is perverse in every way. KITTSCHER: But you do not say I am wrong. —Kittscher’s Daemonologie, 1933

One, a shy girl with brown braids and thick glasses, had confessed that her world was at a nexus between two minor compass directions, being High Rhyme and High Linearity. Nancy hadn't known what to say to that, and so she hadn't said anything at all. Increasingly, that felt like the safest option she had.

Maybe that was why another part of me--a very small part--had wanted to kiss Wallace then. Both sides of his mouth, between his brows, and every other place those stupid worry lines marred his expression. That part of me had wanted to hold him tight and give him the comfort I knew he couldn’t ask for. But that part terrified me the most.

Spinoza was the supreme rationalist. He saw an endless stream of causality in the world. For him there is no such entity as will or will power. Nothing happens capriciously. Everything is caused by something prior, and the more we devote ourselves to the understanding of this causative network, the more free we become." ... "I'm sure he would have said that you are subject to passions that are driven by inadequate ideas rather than by the ideas that flow from a true quest for understanding the nature of reality." ... "He states explicitly that a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a more clear and distinct idea of it--that is, the causative nexus underlying the passion." p.269

All because I fell in love with a madman.

Every attempt through history to limit the definition of humanity has been a prelude to the subjugation, degradation, and slaughter of innocents.

I think it's all that's holding me together," Kade said. "Then perhaps you should fall apart," Ananda replied.

To understand a thing is to gain the power to change it. 

Contrary to what the naive view believes, Homo sapiens didn’t conquer the world because we are talented at turning information into an accurate map of reality. Rather, the secret of our success is that we are talented at using information to connect lots of individuals. Unfortunately, this ability often goes hand in hand with believing in lies, errors, and fantasies.

Why am I here?” Jake asked. “Why did I forget everything from before?” “Because the man in black has drawn you here,” the gunslinger said. “And because of the Tower. The Tower stands at a kind of . . . power-nexus. In time.” “I don’t understand that!

Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. The main argument of this book is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem, then, is a network problem.

The increasing unfathomability of our information network is one of the reasons for the recent wave of populist parties and charismatic leaders. When people can no longer make sense of the world, and when they feel overwhelmed by immense amounts of information they cannot digest, they become easy prey for conspiracy theories, and they turn for salvation to something they do understand—a human.

Thank you.”“You don’t have to thank me. It’s the truth.” He visibly relaxed, the corner of his mouth twitching upward. “Though, you’re welcome to thank me in any way you see fit.” I rolled my eyes and leaned forward, kissing his cheek. “Thank you.”He looked thoughtful at that, tensing in concentration.“What?”“I’m trying to think of something else I can say, for you to thank me.”I smacked his arm.

He clearly felt awe and respect for these two women but also was not bothered by the fact that they lived a razor’s edge from death. He knew it likely helped that they were Black women; market research found that the public generally cared less for their survival. In the center of the complicated nexus of adored and hated, desired but also easy to watch being destroyed, it had to be a Black woman.

Through their donations and work for voluntary organizations, the charitable rich exert enormous influence in society. As philanthropists, they acquire status within and outside of their class. Although private wealth is the basis of the hegemony of this group, philanthropy is essential to the maintenance and perpetuation of the upper class in the United States. In this sense, nonprofit activities are the nexus of a modern power elite.

Stop bein’ such a pussy.” “I’m not a p-pansy,” Aiden stuttered,tripping over the last word. Vulgar terminology didn't exist in his vocabulary. Whenever he tried to push the envelope, he choked in the cutest way possible. “I said pussy,” she emphasized. He went red from the neck up. “I heard you!

The prescience, he realized, was an illumination that incorporated the limits of what it revealed- at once a source of accuracy and meaningful error. A kind of Heisenberg indeterminacy intervened: the expenditure of energy that revealed what he saw, changed what he saw. And what he saw was a time nexus within this cave, a boiling of possibilities focused here, wherein the most minute action - the wink of an eye, a careless word, a misplaced grain of sand - moved a gigantic lever across the known universe. He saw violence with the outcome subject to so many variables that his slightest movement created vast shiftings in the patterns. The vision made him want to freeze into immobility, but this, too was action with its consequences.

He was also aware that while the public was dividing and conquering itself by focusing on banal, media-driven conflicts such as Neoconservatives versus Liberals, democracy versus terrorism and the West versus the rest, destructive covert outfits were slowly but surely growing stronger. The special agent also understood how groups like Nexus fostered and benefited from the climate of fear perpetuated in television broadcasts and newspaper headlines. As long as Americans were consumed by fear of evildoers, whether these be communists, terrorists, religious extremists or any other potential enemy, he knew they would never realize the greatest enemy of all was operating within – within the West, within America, within their own Government.

So many of the professional foreign policy establishment, and so many of their hangers-on among the lumpen academics and journalists, had become worried by the frenzy and paranoia of the Nixonian Vietnam policy that consensus itself was threatened. Ordinary intra-mural and extra-mural leaking, to such duly constituted bodies as Congress, was getting out of hand. It was Kissinger who inaugurated the second front or home front of the war; illegally wiretapping the telephones even of his own staff and of his journalistic clientele. (I still love to picture the face of Henry Brandon when he found out what his hero had done to his telephone.) This war against the enemy within was the genesis of Watergate; a nexus of high crime and misdemeanour for which Kissinger himself, as Isaacson wittily points out, largely evaded blame by taking to his ‘shuttle’ and staying airborne. Incredibly, he contrived to argue in public with some success that if it were not for democratic distempers like the impeachment process his own selfless, necessary statesmanship would have been easier to carry out. This is true, but not in the way that he got newspapers like Rees-Mogg’s Times to accept.

What the example of astrology illustrates is that errors, lies, fantasies, and fictions are information, too. Contrary to what the naive view of information says, information has no essential link to truth, and its role in history isn’t to represent a preexisting reality. Rather, what information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things—whether couples or empires. Its defining feature is connection rather than representation, and information is whatever connects different points into a network.

Funny is like sexy, and they are kind of related. What turns one person on is hilarious to another person. And vice versa. And you can see all of this at the nexus of clowns. Many people think clowns are hilarious. (Many others think clowns are creepy.) But there is a certain percentage of people who think clowns are sexy. Don't believe me, Google "clown porn" right now. I dare you. And if you don't need to Google that, then it's because it is already saved on your browser. So when these dudes say, "Women aren't funny," they are forgetting a classically important addendum: "to me." They should be saying, "Women aren't funny to me." But they don't say "to me" because if you are a man in America, you are considered the norm. (Remember it's the NBA and the W[omen's]NBA, not the WNBA and the M[en's]NBA.) And if you are a white man in America, then you are also considered the norm.

This, to my thinking, actually represented the great nexus of the Intelligence Community and the tech industry: both are entrenched and unelected powers that pride themselves on maintaining absolute secrecy about their developments. Both believe that they have the solutions for everything, which they never hesitate to unilaterally impose. Above all, they both believe that these solutions are inherently apolitical, because they’re based on data, whose prerogatives are regarded as preferable to the chaotic whims of the common citizen.

He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss stares also into you.

What do you think you're going to do with an antique rifle?" "Probably shoot something with it.

I'm going to stick by you, for better or for worse." "It will most likely be worse, you know." "Yeah, I figured.

It was a toss-up which was more pointless: Arguing with an algorithm or talking back to his mother.

in a surveillance state it was vital to reserve the ability to turn a blind eye to certain people at certain times.

The past was read-only.

AI can process information by itself, and thereby replace humans in decision making. AI isn’t a tool—it’s an agent.

He glanced to the walkways on either side of him, wondering what the chances were that he would actually catch sight of Ziva. Keeping an eye out for someone who didn't want to be found - especially when that someone was Lieutenant Ziva Payvan - was as close to futile as something could get. It wasn't a matter of finding her, but rather of her making herself known when she saw fit.

We are hurtling toward a day of ecological reckoning. We should have acted many years ago to contain the damage and build a bridge to a different kind of civilization. Now we are faced with an increased population, worse pollution, dwindling resources, progressive biological destruction, much greater complexity, compounding debt, and enormous inertia in the system—a nexus of problems that have no separate solutions, only an aggregate solution requiring a total revolution in our way of life.

We are taught that men are the key to happiness and fulfillment. We fear that without heterosexual marriage and childbearing we cannot become people who matter or “real” adults. It is this nexus of desire and fear that is the breeding ground for self-destructive behavior like dieting. Rather than being taught that you deserve love simply because you are a person, you are taught that love is something people must earn through particular socially sanctioned methods. For many women, that method is weight control.

From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were moulding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. They recognized only one kind of activity—creation. Nobody could command their services because they had of their own pledged themselves to give all. They gave gratuitously, because that is the only way to give.

KNOWN ABILITIES: Empath [DON’T BELIEVE ANYTHING ELSE MY MOM TELLS YOU] RESIDENCE: The Shores of Solace and Candleshade [ANYONE WANNA TRADE LIVES WITH ME?] IMMEDIATE FAMILY: Lord Cassius Sencen (father); Lady Gisela Sencen (mother) [AKA: WORST. PARENTS. EVER!] MATCH STATUS: Unregistered [TRY NOT TO BE TOO HEARTBROKEN, PEOPLE] [THOUGH I GOTTA SAY: I DON’T REALLY GET WHY EVERYONE PAYS SO MUCH ATTENTION TO THIS.] EDUCATION: Current Foxfire prodigy [AND PROUD DETENTION RECORD–HOLDER] NEXUS: No longer required [BECAUSE I’M COOL LIKE THAT] PATHFINDER: Not assigned. Restricted to Leapmasters and home crystals. [HA, THAT’S WHAT YOU THINK!] SPYBALL APPROVAL: None [BUT I HAVE FRIENDS WITH CONNECTIONS, THAT’S ALL I’M SAYING.…] MEMBER OF THE NOBILITY: No [THANK GOODNESS] TITLE: None [UM, HELLO, WHAT ABOUT LORD HUNKYHAIR? THAT’S A THING!] NOBLE ASSIGNMENT: None [MASTER MISCHIEF-MAKER] SIGNIFICANT CONNECTIONS: Fealty-sworn member of the Black Swan; former Wayward at Exillium; son to one of the leaders of the Neverseen [SWORN PROTECTOR OF THE MYSTERIOUS MISS F] ASSIGNED BODYGUARD(S): Ro (ogre) [AND SHE KNOWS, LIKE, 500,000 WAYS TO KILL YOU! SO IT’S REALLY NOT A GOOD IDEA TO MESS WITH US!]

In particular, the rise of companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon has propelled a great deal of progress. Never before have such deep-pocketed corporations viewed artificial intelligence as absolutely central to their business models—and never before has AI research been positioned so close to the nexus of competition between such powerful entities. A similar competitive dynamic is unfolding among nations. AI is becoming indispensable to militaries, intelligence agencies, and the surveillance apparatus in authoritarian states.* Indeed, an all-out AI arms race might well be looming in the near future.

Phobologic discipline is comprised of twenty-eight exercises, each focusing upon a separate nexus of the nervous system. The five primaries are the knees and hams, lungs and heart, loins and bowels, the lower back, and the girdle of the shoulders, particularly the trapezius muscles, which yoke the shoulder to the neck. A secondary nexus, for which the Lakedaemonians have twelve more exercises, is the face, specifically the muscles of the jaw, the neck and the four ocular constrictors around the eye sockets. These nexuses are termed by the Spartans phobosynakteres, fear accumulators. Fear spawns in the body, phonologic science teaches, and must be combated there. For once the flesh is seized, a phobokyklos, or loop of fear, may commence, feeding upon itself, mounting into a “runaway” of terror. Put the body into a state of phobia, fearlessness, the Spartans believe, and the mind will follow.

I need you,” he said. Otherwise I’m going to die, he said to himself. I know it; Mercer knew it; I think you know it, too. And I’m wasting my time appealing to you, he reflected. An android can’t be appealed to; there’s nothing in there to reach. Rachael said, “I’m sorry, Rick, but I can’t do it tonight. It’ll have to be tomorrow.” “Android vengeance,” Rick said. “What?” “Because I tripped you up on the Voigt-Kampff scale.” “Do you think that?” Wide-eyed, she said, “Really?” “Good-bye,” he said, and started to hang up. “Listen,” Rachael said rapidly. “You’re not using your head.” “It seems that way to you because you Nexus-6 types are cleverer than humans.” “No, I really don’t understand,” Rachael sighed. “I can tell that you don’t want to do this job tonight—maybe not at all. Are you sure you want me to make it possible for you to retire the three remaining androids? Or do you want me to persuade you not to try?

This problem,” Rick said, “stems entirely from your method of operation, Mr. Rosen. Nobody forced your organization to evolve the production of humanoid robots to a point where—” “We produced what the colonists wanted,” Eldon Rosen said. “We followed the time-honored principle underlying every commercial venture. If our firm hadn’t made these progressively more human types, other firms in the field would have. We knew the risk we were taking when we developed the Nexus-6 brain unit. But your Voigt-Kampff test was a failure before we released that type of android. If you had failed to classify a Nexus-6 android as an android, if you had checked it out as human—but that’s not what happened.” His voice had become hard and bitingly penetrating. “Your police department—others as well—may have retired, very probably have retired, authentic humans with underdeveloped empathic ability, such as my innocent niece here. Your position, Mr. Deckard, is extremely bad morally. Ours isn’t.

There is an uncomfortable willingness among privacy campaigners to discriminate against mass surveillance conducted by the state to the exclusion of similar surveillance conducted for profit by large corporations. Partially, this is a vestigial ethic from the Californian libertarian origins of online pro-privacy campaigning. Partially, it is a symptom of the superior public relations enjoyed by Silicon Valley technology corporations, and the fact that those corporations also provide the bulk of private funding for the flagship digital privacy advocacy groups, leading to a conflict of interest. At the individual level, many of even the most committed privacy campaigners have an unacknowledged addiction to easy-to-use, privacy-destroying amenities like Gmail, Facebook, and Apple products. As a result, privacy campaigners frequently overlook corporate surveillance abuses. When they do address the abuses of companies like Google, campaigners tend to appeal to the logic of the market, urging companies to make small concessions to user privacy in order to repair their approval ratings. There is the false assumption that market forces ensure that Silicon Valley is a natural government antagonist, and that it wants to be on the public’s side—that profit-driven multinational corporations partake more of the spirit of democracy than government agencies. Many privacy advocates justify a predominant focus on abuses by the state on the basis that the state enjoys a monopoly on coercive force. For example, Edward Snowden was reported to have said that tech companies do not “put warheads on foreheads.” This view downplays the fact that powerful corporations are part of the nexus of power around the state, and that they enjoy the ability to deploy its coercive power, just as the state often exerts its influence through the agency of powerful corporations. The movement to abolish privacy is twin-horned. Privacy advocates who focus exclusively on one of those horns will find themselves gored on the other.

ALL ARE WELCOME. (NO FIGHTING.) That rule is simple on the surface, but not easy in the execution, because Maz Kanata's castle has been a meeting place since time immemorial-- a nexus point drawing together countless lines of allegiance and opposition, a place not only where friend and foe can meet, but where complex conflicts are worn down flat so that all may sit, have a drink and a meal, listen to a song, and broker whatever deals their hearts or politics require. That's why the flags outside her castle represent hundreds of cities and civilizations and guilds from before forever. The galaxy is not now, nor has it ever been, two polar forces battling for supremacy. It has been thousands of forces: a tug-of-war not with as ingle rope but a spider's web of influence, dominance, and desire. Clans and cults, tribes and families, governments and anti-governments. Queens, satraps, warlords! Diplomats, buccaneers, droids! Slicers, spicers, ramblers, and gamblers! To repeat: ALL ARE WELCOME. (NO FIGHTING.)

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write. But I have never stopped, and of course, as a professional philologist (especially interested in linguistic aesthetics), I have changed in taste, improved in theory, and probably in craft. Behind my stories is now a nexus of languages (mostly only structurally sketched). But to those creatures which in English I call misleadingly Elvesfn11 are assigned two related languages more nearly completed, whose history is written, and whose forms (representing two different sides of my own linguistic taste) are deduced scientifically from a common origin. Out of these languages are made nearly all the names that appear in my legends. This gives a certain character (a cohesion, a consistency of linguistic style, and an illusion of historicity) to the nomenclature, or so I believe, that is markedly lacking in other comparable things. Not all will feel this as important as I do, since I am cursed by acute sensibility in such matters.

McDougall was a certified revolutionary hero, while the Scottish-born cashier, the punctilious and corpulent William Seton, was a Loyalist who had spent the war in the city. In a striking show of bipartisan unity, the most vociferous Sons of Liberty—Marinus Willett, Isaac Sears, and John Lamb—appended their names to the bank’s petition for a state charter. As a triple power at the new bank—a director, the author of its constitution, and its attorney—Hamilton straddled a critical nexus of economic power. One of Hamilton’s motivations in backing the bank was to introduce order into the manic universe of American currency. By the end of the Revolution, it took $167 in continental dollars to buy one dollar’s worth of gold and silver. This worthless currency had been superseded by new paper currency, but the states also issued bills, and large batches of New Jersey and Pennsylvania paper swamped Manhattan. Shopkeepers had to be veritable mathematical wizards to figure out the fluctuating values of the varied bills and coins in circulation. Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785, but for many years New York shopkeepers still quoted prices in pounds, shillings, and pence. The city was awash with strange foreign coins bearing exotic names: Spanish doubloons, British and French guineas, Prussian carolines, Portuguese moidores. To make matters worse, exchange rates differed from state to state. Hamilton hoped that the Bank of New York would counter all this chaos by issuing its own notes and also listing the current exchange rates for the miscellaneous currencies. Many Americans still regarded banking as a black, unfathomable art, and it was anathema to upstate populists. The Bank of New York was denounced by some as the cat’s-paw of British capitalists. Hamilton’s petition to the state legislature for a bank charter was denied for seven years, as Governor George Clinton succumbed to the prejudices of his agricultural constituents who thought the bank would give preferential treatment to merchants and shut out farmers. Clinton distrusted corporations as shady plots against the populace, foreshadowing the Jeffersonian revulsion against Hamilton’s economic programs. The upshot was that in June 1784 the Bank of New York opened as a private bank without a charter. It occupied the Walton mansion on St. George’s Square (now Pearl Street), a three-story building of yellow brick and brown trim, and three years later it relocated to Hanover Square. It was to house the personal bank accounts of both Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and prove one of Hamilton’s most durable monuments, becoming the oldest stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.