Shared reality
“If our goal is to live in a shared reality with our neighbors, what if our current approach isn't bringing us any closer to that?”
—Peter McIndoe in a TED talk about his satirical conspiracy theory, Birds Aren't Real
“If our goal is to live in a shared reality with our neighbors, what if our current approach isn't bringing us any closer to that?”
—Peter McIndoe in a TED talk about his satirical conspiracy theory, Birds Aren't Real
“Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.”
—Sophocles
“What are human beings without animals? If all the animals ceased to exist, human beings would die of a great loneliness of the spirit. For whatever happens to the animals will happen soon also to human beings. All things connect.”
—Chief Seattle, from an inscription at the Frederick Douglass Greater Rochester International Airport
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
According to Quote Investigator, this was not spoken by Carl Sagan, as some claim, but rather written by reporter Sharon Begle.
In any case, I'd like to offer a corollary:
Somewhere, a song you'll love is waiting for you to hear it.
I know I'm late to the party, but Cory Doctorow's essay on “enshittification” is brilliant.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
—Cory Doctorow in Tiktok's enshittification
I'm not sure where I heard this, but it beautifully summarizes an important issue:
Every explanation fits the past.
In other words, any theory can be molded to agree with previous observations. A theory's usefulness and validity depends more so on whether it can correctly guess what will happen in the future, whether it has predictive power.
edit (2026-01-30): Although I'm not certain, I vaguely remember the quote coming from Scott Adams, who was interviewed on a podcast I listen to. Scott Adams had some good ideas, lots of bad ones, some crazy beliefs, and some strange, unexplainable political allegiances. That doesn't make the observation any less valid. Life is messy.
“We need to find a way back to reality, and the only way to do that is to have conversations that aren’t mediated by technology that is financed and animated by third parties who hope to persuade us. We must fight to speak to each other outside of the persuasion labyrinth.”
—Jaron Lanier in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now