Yquotes.com

 

"...Do I have to tell you about the spiritual cannibalism of the culture, our culture, which has been bombarding us with ultrasensory overstimulation aiming to reprocess us into fulltime consumption machines, stealing above all from us our time (not an inch of time without an imprint of message), and even our very sense of time (to be measured in lengths of no more than one message unit each) under the guise of entertainment, and even of 'art,' commoditizing the eternal, hyping the primal? Our time is the sine qua non of our identity. We need to take extreme measures to reclaim it for ourselves and each other."
--
from Open Space 1 audio CD, 1988 March.

 

Benjamin Boretz

» Benjamin Boretz - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

Primal time is atemporal; an eternal now. To speak of atemporal or timeless time is paradoxical, but the paradox can be relieved if we see that primal time focuses on causal rather than chronological sequence; for primal peoples, "past" means preeminently closer to the originating Source of things. That the Source precedes the present is of secondary importance.

 

Huston Smith

 

There has never been a time in history when more of our "culture" was as "owned" as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now.

 

Lawrence Lessig

 

Before industrial civilization, local and regional communities made their own music, their own entertainment. The esthetics were based on traditions that went far back in time—i.e. folklore. But part of the con of mass culture is to make you forget history, disconnect you from tradition and the past. Sometimes that can be a good thing. Sometimes it can even be revolutionary. But tradition can also keep culture on an authentic human level, the homespun as opposed to the mass produced. Industrial civilization figured out how to manufacture popular culture and sell it back to the people. You have to marvel at the ingenuity of it! The problem is that the longer this buying and selling goes on, the more hollow and bankrupt the culture becomes. It loses its fertility, like worn out, ravaged farmland. Eventually, the yokels who bought the hype, the pitch, they want in on the game. When there are no more naive hicks left, you have a culture where everybody is conning each other all the time. There are no more earnest "squares" left—everybody's "hip," everybody is cynical.

 

Robert Crumb

 

"It Simply Drives GP Crazy"
Well, then, that was a short drive to Crazyland for the folks who run GP.
Obama is correct in his criticism of youth culture, because it explains, largely, why American students are falling behind the rest of the world.
American kids spend, according to the Kaiser Foundation, on the average 6.5 hours per day consuming electronic entertainment, made possibly by multi-tasking consumption.
This is time that should be spent doing homework, reading books, getting exercise etc.
Only a "crazy" bunch of gamers, to use Dennis McCauley's own descriptive and accurate word, would think that video games, which constitute a colossal waste of time and talent, are not affecting how kids act, think, and develop.
Indeed, the influence of the games can be shown by the total inability of the gamer pixelantes who post here to grasp this obvious truth. How sad. How predictable. How typical of lazy American gamer nitwits.
Jack Thompson

 

Jack Thompson

 

I have five minutes left to give you a message to take home. The message is simple. "God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world". This was said by Francis Bacon, one of the founding fathers of modern science, almost four hundred years ago. Bacon was the smartest man of his time, with the possible exception of William Shakespeare.

 

Freeman Dyson