This Is Not A Pipe

"I'm not really saying anything that they're not already saying in the particular chapters I'm talking about. What I'm trying to do is just push their ideas, if you like, to their logical conclusions, where they're almost creating problems for themselves and their own way of acting and being as theorists or philosophers."

"I really think this is the most important intellectual work we could be doing today... A politics with a vision. A politics of worldbuilding. A politics that recognizes the long, hard work of it. A politics that goes beyond the weekend protest that looks good on TV and is more defined by the everyday, nitty-gritty, hard work of showing up and trying to build a new world."

"This idea that only a few people--who happen to be white men--created change, to me that was a pretty limiting history. So I was really writing against this 'founding fathers' story of digital culture."

"That experience of being in this country as an immigrant, both inside and outside, having to adopt certain ways of thinking and having to erase other ways of thinking, other parts of me that cannot be rendered in this new context, I think that's where this idea [of nodocentrism] came from."

"It’s hard to look at pictures without saying ‘oh that’s just a picture’ and not think about all the kinds of connections that are being made...I’m using this other mode of thinking, which has different affordances and it allowed me to think about things in different ways."

"If I set failure as a goal, then I put myself into a paradoxical position because either I fail to reach it--so in some sense I've succeeded at failing--or I succeed in reaching it, in which case I failed at failing. Paradoxes and impossible goals really intrigue me."

"There are a lot of horrifying things lurking in the autocomplete field...People used to confess to their priest or some sort of trusted figure and now people spell out their secrets to the search bar, to the machine."

"I was thinking about the historical moment in which it was created and I was thinking about it as a cultural critic and cultural historian who is interested in issues of social justice, who is interested in reading people who have at times been marginal to the narrative... But also leaving some room for ambiguity."

"There's always the nostalgia of something with the concept of biopolitics. And it's even more visible with Agamben. I mean I love Agamben...but I must confess that there is something I cannot accept...the underlying nostalgia for something that would be pure and authentic."

"We were told for a very long time that tech would be democratizing. And that has not necessarily proven to be true."