Shopping in Jail
Author: Douglas Coupland
Release: September 6, 2013
Tagline: Ideas, Essays, and Stories for the Increasingly Real Twenty-First Century
Publisher: Sternberg Press
Genre: Essays, Short Stories, Collections
ISBN-10: 3943365867
ISBN-13: 978-3943365863
Declassified by Agent Palmer: Shopping in Jail offers quick trips back to the not-so-distant past
Quotes and Lines
He is the heir apparent of McLuhan–for the Internet and, now, post-Internet world.
The subconscious is actually a lot like Antarctica: it’s huge, we know very little about it, it’s incredibly hard to reach, and it can be visited only if you have access to lots of money.
In an ever-flattening world of downloaded nonphysical experiences, the crafted object is in the ascendant, and ultimately might prove to be the trunk of the tree that gives rise to the next dominant wave of modern art.
I was surprised and remain surprised to this day that so many people clicked with X–or with any of the books I’ve written–because it always seems, in the end, that writing is such a desolate, lonely profession and it never gets less lonely.
The things worth writing about, and the things worth reading about, are the things that feel almost beyond description at the start and are, because of that, frightening.
Once you get used to a certain level of connection, there’s just no way to go back to where you were before. The thing about 2012 is that people are more connected than they’ve ever been before–except they’ve been tricked into thinking they’re more isolated than ever. How did that happen?
I muse on the 7 billion people on earth, and how almost everybody these days voraciously devours countless unbundled fragments of our creative past, either by watching it as a YouTube clip or by sticking it in a plastic envelope for sale on eBay, and how we seem to be consuming far more culture than we create. I’m wondering if everything before 2001 will be considered the Age of Content, and all the time thereafter as the Age of Devouring.
Ahhh … meetings. Those spiritual cattle slaughter facilities where so many of our cherished dreams go on to die hideous protracted deaths.
I think of all the people I know who are addicted to the Internet–most everybody, really–and how the thought of being without it is impossible. And I think about my maxim that “you can either have information or you can have a life, but you can’t have both,” and I wonder if the goal of the future is to prove that maxim false. If information gets smarter, and when machines really do begin talking to other machines, maybe we will engineer an Internet where people no longer feel swamped or overwhelmed or constantly anxious about being culled from the pack.
A form of ecotourism–visiting a place where there was a guarantee of relief from one’s own daily ecosystem.
When does unearned historical privilege become an inarguable right?