life's a ditch
dig it
"As hunter-gatherers we were brilliant scientists, but we were nodes locked in a complex network we had little to no say in. And so we warped and mutilated our world with fire and countless other inventions, trying to have as big of an impact as we could, to extend our reach beyond our arms. [...] Cambrian explosions of the meme, even while we warped the land to collapse diversity of the gene."
- @rechelon William Gillis' review of James C Scott's Against the Grain
James C. Scott (2017). Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven: Yale University Press. James C. Scott’s latest book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, is sure to become a classic and a brick in the wall of core anarchist theory. It covers somewhat different but complementary...
"There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it [a] train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into another idea: they will disappear."
Ralph Waldo #Emerson, “Circles”
Imagine you could talk to Hieronymus Bosch, the authors of the Book of Revelation, or of the Voynich Manuscript—a bizarre 15th century text written in an uncrackable code; that you could solve centuries-old mysteries by asking them, “what were you thinking?” You might be disappointed to hear them say, as does Luigi Serafini, author and illustrator of the Codex Seraphinianus, “At the end of the day [it’s] similar to the Rorschach inkblot test.