Playground Richard Powers Quotes

The world was bigger, stranger, richer, and wilder than I had a right to ask for.

If two choices are impossible to choose between, it means they have equal merit. Either choice can have your belief. It doesn’t matter which you choose. You shed one chooser and grow into another.

Every human heart imagines God in a different way. A way just right for that imaginer.

The world with all its bright and surprising contents was created out of boredom and emptiness. Everything started by holding still and waiting.

The next day this impossible feeling would begin to seem ordinary.

Bliss was so simple. Just hold still and look.

A hunter’s moon pulled at the willing water, crashing it against the edge of the continent, and the pulse of that liquid piston was better than any song.

Neither Rafi nor I saw what was happening. No one did. That computers would take over our lives: Sure. But the way that they would turn us into different beings? The full flavor of our translated hearts and minds? Not even my most enlightened fellow programmers at CRIK foresaw that with any resolution. Sure, they predicted personal, portable Encyclopedia Britannicas and group real-time teleconferencing and personal assistants that could teach you how to write better. But Facebook and WhatsApp and TikTok and Bitcoin and QAnon and Alexa and Google Maps and smart tracking ads based on keywords stolen from your emails and checking your likes while at a urinal and shopping while naked and insanely stupid but addictive farming games that wrecked people’s careers and all the other neural parasites that now make it impossible for me to remember what thinking and feeling and being were really like, back then? Not even close.

For the billionaires, champagne baths every morning and new Lamborghinis every afternoon couldn’t deplete the fathomless amount of cash on hand. “Your entire philosophy of money changes,” writes author Richard Frank in his book, Richistan. “You realize that you can’t possibly spend all of your fortune, or even part of it, in your lifetime, and that your money will probably grow over the years even if you spend lavishly.” There are dotcom entrepreneurs who could live top 1 percent American lifestyles and not run out of cash for 4,000 years. People who Bill Simmons would call “pajama rich,” so rich they can go to a five-star restaurant or sit courtside at the NBA playoffs in their pajamas. They have so much money that they have nothing to prove to anyone. And many of them are totally depressed. You’ll remember the anecdote I shared in this book’s introduction about being too short to reach between the Olympic rings at the playground jungle gym. I had to jump to grab the first ring and then swing like a pendulum in order to reach the next ring. To get to the third ring, I had to use the momentum from the previous swing to keep going. If I held on to the previous ring too long, I’d stop and wouldn’t be able to get enough speed to reach the next ring. This is Isaac Newton’s first law of motion at work: objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless acted on by external forces. Once you start swinging, it’s easier to keep swinging than to slow down. The problem with some rapid success, it turns out, is that lucky breaks like Bear Vasquez’s YouTube success or an entrepreneur cashing out on an Internet wave are like having someone lift you up so you can grab one of the Olympic rings. Even if you get dropped off somewhere far along the chain, you’re stuck in one spot. Financial planners say that this is why a surprisingly high percentage of the rapidly wealthy get depressed. As therapist Manfred Kets de Vries once put it in an interview with The Telegraph, “When money is available in near-limitless quantities, the victim sinks into a kind of inertia.

She did not mind the judgement of others. Her mild contempt for most of her human neighbors made her the most discreet person in Tuamotus. If her beloved songbirds were happy and well, the larger bipeds could rot in the hells of their own making.

people still published paperbound books listing all the most interesting website addresses to type into your browser.

harm I caused you both. But I give you this, this gift that our dead friend here gave me. He hands her the packet. She opens the sheaf of paper and starts to read. A few words in, and she cries out in pain.

The Tempest: Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.

Did something happen to you, growing up? Something you’re trying to fix? Something you need to give to someone?” “I loved computers the moment I saw one. I think I was born this way.” I’d forgotten, entirely, what I loved before I loved computers. Rafi shook his head as I spoke. He knew my roots, every bit as well as I knew his. “No, brother. That ain’t it. But whatever. If it makes you feel good to think so, then think so.

Hope and truth could not be reconciled. The things that had filled her with awe were passing away. There was no other honest ending.

There was so much to life, too much, more than Beaulieu could do justice to, more than any living thing could guess at or merit. She loved it all, even humans, for without the miracle of human consciousness, love for such a world would be just one more of a billion unnamed impulses.

There were insanely different ways of being alive, behaviors from another galaxy dreamed up by an alien God.

He skitters through the schoolyard like a traitor to childhood. He learns the shibboleths—the famous refrains from countless sitcoms, the hooks of pernicious little radio tunes, the bios of fifteen-year-old sexpot starlets he’s supposed to be slayed by. But at night, his dreams fill not with playground battles or the day’s take-down gossip but with visions of tight, lovely code doing more with less—bits of data passing from memory to register to accumulator and back in a dance so beautiful he can’t begin to tell his friends. They wouldn’t know how to see what he put in front of their eyes.

But the book insisted that even the oddest fish was still my first cousin, compared to the other beings down there. The ocean teemed with primordial life—monsters left behind from evolution’s oldest back alleys—ring-shaped, tube-shaped, shapeless, impossible plant-animal mash-ups with no right to exist, beasts so unlikely I wondered if my beloved author invented them.

Power, the mayor decided, was an isolating thing, especially when power was powerless. For

Everyone needs to eat, but few people are aware of who sets the table.

I used to measure out my weeks on a calendar app shared with four assistants, where every quarter-hour box was filled in with multiple colors of appointment. Now my calendar app is a red plastic stick of seven sequential pill compartments embossed with the days of the week. And even with that handy tool, I sometimes stop and ask my phone: Did we do Tuesday already?

We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.

WHEN I GOT BACK down to school in early December, I took Rafi and Ina up North of Green with me, to my little carrel on the second floor of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. I sat them down in front of my terminal, which had a direct Ethernet connection to the university’s networked mainframes.