Category Archives: Quotes

“The video game remains an icon of its age, an emblem for the interpellation of ideological subjectivity, and a tool which continues (through its counter-claims of interactivity) ably to fulfil that function on behalf of capital, military and state. The … Continue reading →

“We might therefore add a third category to Roland Barthes’s classification of scriptible and lisible texts: the faux-scriptible text which proclaims its openness to interactivity, which gives its user the illusion of meaning, power and active participation, and which, in … Continue reading →

“What we have in academia, in other words, is a microcosm of the American economy as a whole: a self-enriching aristocracy, a swelling and increasingly immiserated proletariat, and a shrinking middle class. The same devil’s bargain stabilizes the system: the … Continue reading →

“Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of … Continue reading →

“[Capital] puts play in quarantine, isolates it in a special ward, as if it wanted to stop it infecting other human activities. Art is this privileged and despised area set apart from commerce. And it will stay that way until … Continue reading →

“What if all the bad things that media critics have been said about passivity for the past century or two are now equally applicable to all the demands to interact, to participate? What if interactivity is now one of the … Continue reading →

“In the worst case, it’s possible to envisage geolocation and data aggregation apps being designed to facilitate the identification and elimination of some ethnic or class enemy, not only by making it easy for users to track them down, but … Continue reading →

“Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, … Continue reading →

“Most good games are against the law.” – Theodore Roosevelt. Presidential Addresses and State Papers VI, 1163

“studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with ‘stuff’ that is normally transparent but can be made visible by … Continue reading →