User Dead Quotes

If your problem is being chronically starved of social bonds, then part of the solution is to bond with the heroin itself and the relief it gives you. But a bigger part is to bond with the subculture that comes with taking heroin—the tribe of fellow users all embarked on the same mission and facing the same threats and risking death every day with you. It gives you an identity. It gives you a life of highs and lows, instead of relentless monotony. The world stops being indifferent to you, and starts being hostile—which is at least proof that you exist, that you aren’t dead already. The heroin helps users deal with the pain of being unable to form normal bonds with other humans. The heroin subculture gives them bonds with other human beings.

The real reason the number of things that are shared via social media every single minute is so astronomical is because, whenever they each do, most users do not share or say something because they believe they have something worth remembering; they do mainly or only because they fear being forgotten.

I’ve been told by professional drug users that if I did the drugs, I would like the Dead. It seems like the most effective PSA against drugs could just play some Dead jams and say, “If you do drugs, you will like this kind of music.” What other deterrent would one need?

The fateful law of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (word uttered and thing beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension--and that is the sign-user himself...The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally.

Sheep are treated like sheep, users are used, and those who deserve more receive everything.

We act in and against a world that remains other to us. Reduced to nothing but users, and our actions forced into the commodity form, our collective work and play produces a world over and against us, one that massively persists in its own habits of functioning.53 Worse, collective human labor made a world for a ruling class that keeps making not only itself but us in its image.

Instagram and Facebook, she’d found out, literally rewired your brain. Likes and comments on a user’s post were found to release bursts of dopamine, which made the user happy. That made sense; everyone enjoyed getting likes on a Facebook post. But this essentially turned the phone into a personal dopamine stimulator. Brain scans showed that in cases of people who were addicted to social media, the brain rewired itself, making them desire more likes, or retweets, or smiling emojis.

Let’s begin with the first ability. To start, we must remember that we’ve been spoiled by the intuitive and drop-dead-simple user experience of many consumer-facing technologies, like Twitter and the iPhone. These examples, however, are consumer products, not serious tools: Most of the intelligent machines driving the Great Restructuring are significantly more complex to understand and master.

Bruce Horn: I thought that computers would be hugely flexible and we could be able to do everything and it would be the most mind-blowing experience ever. And instead we froze all of our thinking. We froze all the software and made it kind of industrial and mass-marketed. Computing went in the wrong direction: Computing went to the direction of commercialism and cookie-cutter. Jaron Lanier: My whole field has created shit. And it’s like we’ve thrust all of humanity into this endless life of tedium, and it’s not how it was supposed to be. The way we’ve designed the tools requires that people comply totally with an infinite number of arbitrary actions. We really have turned humanity into lab rats that are trained to run mazes. I really think on just the most fundamental level we are approaching digital technology in the wrong way. Andy van Dam: Ask yourself, what have we got today? We’ve got Microsoft Word and we’ve got PowerPoint and we’ve got Illustrator and we’ve got Photoshop. There’s more functionality and, for my taste, an easier-to-understand user interface than what we had before. But they don’t work together. They don’t play nice together. And most of the time, what you’ve got is an import/export capability, based on bitmaps: the lowest common denominator—dead bits, in effect. What I’m still looking for is a reintegration of these various components so that we can go back to the future and have that broad vision at our fingertips. I don’t see how we are going to get there, frankly. Live bits—where everything interoperates—we’ve lost that. Bruce Horn: We’re waiting for the right thing to happen to have the same type of mind-blowing experience that we were able to show the Apple people at PARC. There’s some work being done, but it’s very tough. And, yeah, I feel somewhat responsible. On the other hand, if somebody like Alan Kay couldn’t make it happen, how can I make it happen?

Being married to someone on the spectrum is challenging. Some people might go so far as to say it’s impossible. A quick internet search on ‘Asperger’s marriage’ will turn up plenty of horror stories. As my husband would tell you, being married to someone with undiagnosed ASD is even more difficult. Without the explanation of Asperger’s and an understanding of the social communication impairments that accompany it, it’s natural for the nonautistic partner to assume that the autistic partner is being intentionally rude, selfish, cold, controlling, and a host of other negative things. Before my diagnosis, there was a frequent pattern in my marriage: I would unknowingly do something hurtful, then be surprised when Sang was upset by it. This inevitably triggered a downward spiral, Sang assuming I was being intentionally hurtful—because how could a grown adult not realize that it was hurtful—and me feeling bewildered about what exactly I’d done to cause so much upset. Often these discussions stalemated in a conversational dead end. I would sink into a shutdown or meltdown, where my only verbal response was, “I don’t know,” and Sang would resort to a frustrated refrain of “I don’t understand you.” Even typing those two phrases is hard because they bring back memories of some of the most difficult times in our marriage.

Before they became junkies, these young people were sitting in a room alone, cut off from meaning. Most of them could hope at best for a McJob with a shrinking minimum wage—a lifelong burger-flip punctuated by watching TV and scrimping for minor consumer objects. “My job was basically to say—why don’t you stop taking drugs?” Bruce says. “And one guy explained to me very beautifully. He said, ‘Well, think about that for a minute. What would I do if I stopped taking drugs? Maybe I could get myself a job as a janitor or something like that.’ ” Compare that, he said, to “what I’m doing right now, which is really exciting. Because I’ve got friends down here and we do exciting things like rob stores and hang around with hookers.” Suddenly you are part of a world where, together with other addicts, you are embarked on a crusade—a constant frenetic crusade to steal enough to buy the drugs, dodge the police, keep out of jail, and stay alive. If your problem is being chronically starved of social bonds, then part of the solution is to bond with the heroin itself and the relief it gives you. But a bigger part is to bond with the subculture that comes with taking heroin—the tribe of fellow users all embarked on the same mission and facing the same threats and risking death every day with you. It gives you an identity. It gives you a life of highs and lows, instead of relentless monotony. The world stops being indifferent to you, and starts being hostile—which is at least proof that you exist, that you aren’t dead already.

Decriminalizing drugs also removes the one lever we have to push men and women toward sobriety. Waiting around for them to decide to opt for treatment is the opposite of compassion when the drugs on the street are as cheap, prevalent, and deadly as they are today. We used to believe people needed to hit rock bottom before seeking treatment. That’s another idea made obsolete by our addiction crisis and the current synthetic drug supply. It belongs to an era when drugs of choice were merciful. Nowadays people are living in tents, screaming at unseen demons, raped, pimped, beaten, unshowered, and unfed. That would seem to be rock bottom. Yet it’s not enough to persuade people to get treatment. In Columbus, Ohio, Giti Mayton remembers a meth addict who was hospitalized with frostbitten, gangrenous hands, yet who left the hospital in midwinter to find more dope. San Francisco and Philadelphia, two cities with years of experience with heroin, are seeing users homeless and dying like never before. The dope is different now. Today, rock bottom is death.

Dead Rite by Stewart Stafford While he lives, hope still clings, The hereafter remains a mystery, If life is but struggle and toil, Then death is hushed serenity. Things he treasured when alive, Trinkets to divide up as booty, The body still lying in repose, Nothing but a fading memory. Lay him down in a mossy grave, Heads bowed in a muttered eulogy, Then back away with platitudes, To the nearest exit from the cemetery. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

Bruce realizes that in all his months and years interviewing addicts about their lives, they had been telling him the answer all along. “People explained over and over before I got it,” Bruce tells me. Before they became junkies, these young people were sitting in a room alone, cut off from meaning. Most of them could hope at best for a McJob with a shrinking minimum wage—a lifelong burger-flip punctuated by watching TV and scrimping for minor consumer objects. “My job was basically to say—why don’t you stop taking drugs?” Bruce says. “And one guy explained to me very beautifully. He said, ‘Well, think about that for a minute. What would I do if I stopped taking drugs? Maybe I could get myself a job as a janitor or something like that.’ ” Compare that, he said, to “what I’m doing right now, which is really exciting. Because I’ve got friends down here and we do exciting things like rob stores and hang around with hookers.” Suddenly you are part of a world where, together with other addicts, you are embarked on a crusade—a constant frenetic crusade to steal enough to buy the drugs, dodge the police, keep out of jail, and stay alive. If your problem is being chronically starved of social bonds, then part of the solution is to bond with the heroin itself and the relief it gives you. But a bigger part is to bond with the subculture that comes with taking heroin—the tribe of fellow users all embarked on the same mission and facing the same threats and risking death every day with you. It gives you an identity. It gives you a life of highs and lows, instead of relentless monotony. The world stops being indifferent to you, and starts being hostile—which is at least proof that you exist, that you aren’t dead already. The heroin helps users deal with the pain of being unable to form normal bonds with other humans. The heroin subculture gives them bonds with other human beings.

Jesus adds a warning that we can’t ignore: “If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand” (verse 5). If our coldness toward Jesus continues, he will blow the light out. The choice for an Ephesian church is repentance, or removal. If a congregation grows cold and worship becomes dead ritual, not many generations have to pass until the church is gone. The building or denomination may still be there; people may still come; someone may stand in the pulpit —but the light, the power, is gone. The lamp has been blown out by Jesus himself.

If, in our day, you should see a polar bear in a Norwegian street, especially in the dead of night, you should tentatively say to the animal: "Good evening?" If the polar bear answers, "Shutyourbigmouth!" or something that sounds like this, in all likelihood, this is not a polar bear but a Norwegian on his way home from a party.

Not long afterward, Crowley saw the first version of an Internet start-up called Twitter. The company was run by Evan Williams, the cofounder of Blogger, who had sold that firm to Google in February 2003 but left in October 2004, unhappy at the relative neglect with which it treated his service. Twitter was a dead-simple Internet and phone service that let people broadcast 140-character messages to anyone who chose to “follow” the stray thoughts of a given user. Crowley began sending emails to people at Google telling them that this was important and Google should jump on it. “It all fell on deaf ears,” Crowley says. “They just weren’t interested in social at the time. It just wasn’t their thing.

Because the software-creation process is out of control, the high-tech industry must bring its process to heel, or else it will continue to put the blame on ordinary users while ever-bigger machines sit dead in the water.

Jesus is clothed in the brilliant garments of a priest — a full-length white robe with a golden sash wrapped across his chest. Beginning at Jesus’ head and moving down to his feet, John describes what Jesus looked like: Hair as white as snow: A picture of the purity and sinlessness of Jesus. Eyes like blazing fire: He can see right through us; every hidden thing is visible to him. Feet like glowing bronze: A symbol of judgment; Jesus’ feet are restless as he moves among his people. A voice like a thundering waterfall: Jesus’ words will block out all other voices; he alone is the supreme authority. A face like the sun: A picture of the stunning glory of Jesus. John was Jesus’ closest human friend on earth. It had been sixty years since they had last seen each other. But John doesn’t run up and slap Jesus on the back and tell him how good it is to see him. In the face of Jesus’ glory, John falls at Jesus’ feet like a dead man. We’ve come up with a lot of strange ideas about what we will do in heaven when we first see Jesus. Some people think they will shake his hand or give him a hug. Some people have questions they want to ask. I think we will do what John did — fall down in awe and wonder and love at Jesus’ feet.

A knife that is not used safely provides no defense at all—it’s more likely to imperil the user than to wound his attacker.

There is already a publication entitled Suicide: A User’s Guide: it catalogues rather quick techniques for stopping your heart or blowing your brains out. Alas, with the resurrection we cannot claim such efficiency. Although it is relatively easy to put an end to one’s own life, it is on the other hand much harder to get it to start again. You do not pull yourself up from six feet under the way you throw yourself out of a sixth-story window. I am capable of removing myself from the company of the living; not of raising myself from the dead.

Virtuous people avail themselves of the things of this life with the moderation of a user, not the attachment of a lover.

The fashion game is fun for architects to play and diverting for the public to watch, but it’s deadly for building users. When the height of fashion moves on, they’re the ones left behind, stuck in a building that was designed to look good rather than work well, and now it doesn’t even look good.

What did the drug user get for parting with a lot of money? Depending on the age of the blood—that is, the time since it’d been removed from its owner—and the age of the vampire from whom the blood had been removed, and the individual chemistry of the drug user, it could be quite a lot. There was the feeling of omnipotence, the increased strength, acute vision, and hearing. And most important of all for Americans, an enhanced physical appearance.

Addiction occurs through choices, but somehow it also happens behind our backs. No one consciously sets out to devote themselves to the machine, to become its addict. Its veto power over all other possible attentions takes place, cumulatively, through every apparently free choice made as a user. We drop into the dead zone, the ‘ticker trance’ of feed addiction, by increment. The way the chronophagic machine fights for our attention recalls what Eastern Christianity used to call the demon of acedia. This was a predecessor of the modern concept of melancholia, and it was used in monasteries (those ancient writing machines) to describe an affliction of the devoted. In the original Greek, ‘akedia’ meant ‘lack of care’. In the Latinized Christian use propagated by Evagrius of Pontus, it described a lack of care about one’s life; a listless, restless spiritual lethargy. The condition left one yearning for distraction and continual novelty, exploiting one’s petty hates and hungers. It dissolved one’s capacity for attending, for living as if living mattered, into a series of itches demanding to be scratched. Ultimately, it was dehumanizing, corrosive of meaning: it was spiritual death.

The root of the disinformation problem, of course, lay in the technology. Facebook was designed to throw gas on the fire of any speech that invoked an emotion, even if it was hateful speech—its algorithms favored sensationalism. Whether a user clicked on a link because they were curious, horrified, or engaged was immaterial; the system saw that the post was being widely read, and it promoted it more widely across users’ Facebook pages. The situation in Myanmar was a deadly experiment in what could happen when the internet landed in a country where a social network became the primary, and most widely trusted, source of news.

In other words, a legal victory is far more devastating than a mere technical one. A firm that sues a rival into oblivion for aiding its customers in grabbing a better experience for themselves (better prices, more privacy or just a user interface that’s better adapted to their capabilities and disabilities) wins a powerful prize. That firm can use the law to reach beyond its four walls, into the minds of potential future competitors and their investors, and permanently terrorize them out of even the merest thought of a challenge to the company’s dominance. That firm can reach into the hearts of its own customers and convince them that any attempt to disloyally reconfigure their experience of the firm’s products will be a futile waste of hope. Venture capitalists call the products and services adjacent to the Big Tech firms’ core technology “the kill zone” and will not invest in any company that proposes to pitch its tent in that dead place. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

His ill-users might never breathe again but she knew that, for him, they would never be dead.

Daily Average People” was still the company’s North Star. The guide said any proposed feature that reduced the number of daily Facebook users by even 0.1 percent was almost certainly dead on arrival.

Look, the predictive algorithms have worked beautifully for ages. We have saved scores of lives. We have averted countless terrorist attacks. We have enhanced the quality of life of all verified users. There have been a couple of recent glitches but, with respect to the families of the dead, it is absurd to suggest these are anything more than exceptionally unusual anomalies. Due to the zettabytes of data we have amassed, we have a unique understanding of the human soul, of its desires and intentions, of the desires and intentions of humans in general and humans in particular. We have offered this unprecedented knowledge of the past, present, and future to the security services and the police, to combat the extreme threat from terror and keep our people safe. You are the beneficiaries, and you are complaining.

Loftus learned for herself how realistic false memories can seem when she had an upsetting experience several years ago. She was shocked when, at a family gathering, an uncle informed her that thirty years earlier, when her mother drowned in a pool, she had been the one who discovered the body. Loftus, who was fourteen when the drowning occurred, always believed that she had never seen her mother's dead body. Indeed, she remembered little about the death itself. She recounts what happened the next in her book 'The Myth of Repressed Memory'. Almost immediately after her uncle's revelation, 'the memories began to drift back, like the crisp, piney smoke from evening camp fires. My mother, dressed in her nightgown, was floating face down. . . . I started screaming. I remembered the police cars, their lights flashing'. A few days later, she writes, 'my brother called to tell me that my uncle had made a mistake. Now he remembered (and other relatives confirmed) that Aunt Pearl had found my mother's body.' This shocked Loftus even more than her uncle's false revelation. If someone so specially trained as she is to recognize fallible memories could suddenly believe her own false memory, just think how readily the average person can be fooled.

People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one are dangerous. Such conviction is the essence not only of dogmatism, but of its more destructive cousin, fanaticism. It blocks off the user from learning new truth, and it is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. The person then has to double his or her protests in order to quiet not only the opposition but his or her own unconscious doubts as well.

While most investors blame bad jockeys for startup failure, some see slow horses as the main problem. For example, billionaire entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel says that “all failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.” Paul Graham, founder of the elite accelerator Y Combinator, likewise holds that having a compelling solution to a customer’s problem—a strong horse—is the key to success: “There’s just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. If you make something users want, you’ll probably be fine, whatever else you do or don’t do. And if you don’t make something users want, then you’re dead, whatever else you do or don’t

We meet people wherever they are at in life. Don’t assume the emotion you observe is about you or your product.

Let us be honest. Did all the priests of Rome increase the mental wealth of man as much as Bruno? Did all the priests of France do as great a work for the civilization of the world as Voltaire or Diderot? Did all the ministers of Scotland add as much to the sum of human knowledge as David Hume? Have all the clergymen, monks, friars, ministers, priests, bishops, cardinals and popes, from the day of Pentecost to the last election, done as much for human liberty as Thomas Paine? What would the world be if infidels had never been? The infidels have been the brave and thoughtful men; the flower of all the world; the pioneers and heralds of the blessed day of liberty and love; the generous spirits of the unworthy past; the seers and prophets of our race; the great chivalric souls, proud victors on the battlefields of thought, the creditors of all the years to be. Why should it be taken for granted that the men who devoted their lives to the liberation of their fellow-men should have been hissed at in the hour of death by the snakes of conscience, while men who defended slavery—practiced polygamy—-justified the stealing of babes from the breasts of mothers, and lashed the naked back of unpaid labor, are supposed to have passed smilingly from earth to the embraces of the angels? Why should we think that the brave thinkers, the investigators, the honest men, must have left the crumbling shore of time in dread and fear, while the instigators of the massacre of St. Bartholomew; the inventors and users of thumb-screws, of iron boots and racks; the burners and tearers of human flesh; the stealers, the whippers and the enslavers of men; the buyers and beaters of maidens, mothers and babes; the founders of the Inquisition; the makers of chains; the builders of dungeons; the calumniators of the living; the slanderers of the dead, and even the murderers of Jesus Christ, all died in the odor of sanctity, with white, forgiven hands folded upon the breasts of peace, while the destroyers of prejudice, the apostles of humanity, the soldiers of liberty, the breakers of fetters, the creators of light, died surrounded by the fierce fiends of God?

Scott Hassan: I remember going to this one meeting at Excite, with George Bell, the CEO. He selects Excite and he types “internet,” and then it pops up a page on the Excite side, and pretty much all of the results are in Chinese, and then on the Google side it basically had stuff all about NSCA Mosaic and a bunch of other pretty reasonable things. George Bell, he’s really upset about this, and it was funny, because he got very defensive. He was like, “We don’t want your search engine. We don’t want to make it easy for people to find stuff, because we want people to stay on our site.” It’s crazy, of course, but back then that was definitely the idea: Keep people on your site, don’t let them leave. And I remember driving away afterward, and Larry and I were talking: “Users come to your website? To search? And you don’t want to be the best damn search engine there is? That’s insane! That’s a dead company, right?

Ezra Callahan: It’s the very first time we actually bring in outside people to test something for us, and their reaction, their initial reaction is clear. People are just like, “Holy shit, like, I shouldn’t be seeing this, like this doesn’t feel right,” because immediately you see this person changed their profile picture, this person did this, this person did that, and your first instinct is Oh my God! Everybody can see this about me! Everyone knows everything I’m doing on Facebook. Max Kelly: But News Feed made perfect sense to all of us, internally. We all loved it. Ezra Callahan: So in-house we have this idea that this isn’t going to go right: This is too jarring a change, it needs to be rolled out slowly, we need to warm people up to this—and Mark is just firmly committed. “We’re just going to do this. We’re just going to launch. It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid.” Ruchi Sanghvi: We pushed the product in the dead of the night, we were really excited, we were celebrating, and then the next morning we woke up to all this pushback. I had written this blog post, “Facebook Gets a Facelift.” Katie Geminder: We wrote a little letter, and at the bottom of it we put a button. And the button said, “Awesome!” Not like, “Okay.” It was, “Awesome!” That’s just rude. I wish I had a screenshot of that. Oh man! And that was it. You landed on Facebook and you got the feature. We gave you no choice and not a great explanation and it scared people. Jeff Rothschild: People were rattled because it just seemed like it was exposing information that hadn’t been visible before. In fact, that wasn’t the case. Everything shown in News Feed was something people put on the site that would have been visible to everyone if they had gone and visited that profile. Ruchi Sanghvi: Users were revolting. They were threatening to boycott the product. They felt that they had been violated, and that their privacy had been violated. There were students organizing petitions. People had lined up outside the office. We hired a security guard.

Who am I? I am the egotist. The user. The perpetual malcontent. A distant blot on a hazy horizon. I am a virus. And I am something more. My name is Loren. I am pervasive. I give shape to the night. If you see me, know that I am already dead. I am the hard, cold light of the stars.

Our nation isn’t just a severed hand, a mutilated grandmother, three dead girls in a basement, embarrassment for a minister, trillions of debt, a double suicide at the railway station and a fatal five-car crash by the coast.