Age of Earthquakes
Author: Douglas Coupland
Release: March 3, 2015
Tagline: A Guide to the Extreme Present
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
ISBN-13: 978-0399173868
Declassified by Agent Palmer: Unplug for your health and read Age of Earthquakes
Quotes and Lines
The bulk of human activity is the creation and moving of information.
Have you maybe noticed that… … our lives are no longer feeling like stories?
We’ve rejigged our body’s perception of time, and it’s not just because you’re older and each year is a smaller percentage of your life. It’s simply moving more quickly.
The ultimate sequencing dysfunction is the inability to look at one’s life as a meaningful sequence or story.
The internet makes you smarter and more impatient.
Sometimes I like watching TV from the 1990s because it’s almost like right now, except there’s no internet, and that relaxes my brain. It’s a form of ecotourism.
‘You’ is what your brain keeps, what it doesn’t, and the processes by which that occurs.
The world feels too out-of-control-ish because too many things are changing too quickly.
Technically, someone who spends all day in front of a screen has no memories of their own except for going to the fridge for a Coke… … That’s spooky.
Individualism may, in fact, be a form of brain mutation not evenly spread throughout the population. Many people are happy to belong to a group – any kind of group – and someone who doesn’t is a threat.
Protect me from what Amazon suggests I want
At the moment we don’t know which will triumph: the individual or the mob. It might be the biggest question of this century.
Technology often favors horrible people
Fortility (n.) forty + futility
Fortility is the increasingly archaic notion that anything less than a 40-hour working week with 3 per cent unemployment is a social failure. In the future, a culturally mandated 40-hour working week may well seem as odd and cruel as seven-year-old children working in Victorian cotton mills.
Healthy people are bad for capitalism.
Where does personality end and brain damage begin?
People talk about the soul as much as they always have. It’s here to stay.