Quotes

Work Hard and Be Kind:

Quote | | Paul Greer

“To work as hard as possible, and then, when you think you’re done, to work just a little bit harder. To know that if it feels “right” it may actually be completely wrong, and that if it feels “wrong” it may be completely right. There’s no governing principle to any of this except that strange instinct and feeling within yourself that you simply have to learn to trust, but which is always unreliably changing. To create something for people who have not been born yet. To pay attention to how it actually feels to be alive, to the lies you tell yourself and others. Not to overreach—but also not to get too comfortable with your own work. To avoid giving in to either self-doubt or self-confidence, depending on your leaning, and especially to resist giving over your opinion of yourself to others—which means not to seek fame or recognition, which can restrain rather than open your possibility for artistic development. With all this in mind, not to expect anything and to be grateful for any true, non-exploitative opportunity that presents itself, however modest. And to understand that being able to say “I don’t know what to do with my life” is an incredible privilege that 99% of the rest of the world will never enjoy.”

—Chris Ware
via kateoplis

GIFABILITY

Quote | | Paul Greer

“The creation and collision of GIFs offers a potentially different implication for the looping horizon: the possibility of communication […] Now, perhaps trapped before a looping horizon, we promote an inverted relationship of understanding: presented with supposedly whole media artifacts, we deconstruct and disperse them, wreck them and from the rubble construct a new lexicon of associations and meanings.”

— Giampaolo Bianconi

(via britticisms)

Rule By The Rich

Quote | | Paul Greer

“The oligarchs are smart. They have realized that the global economy is starting to die. It’s short on resources, and the costs for what remains are skyrocketing. The prospects for rapid economic growth in the real economy, and for sustained high-level “surplus value,” are sharply diminished. So, many of the wealthy are coming to the view that they will no longer seek business growth, per se. More and more of them are seeking political control as a way of gaining economic expansion. They can squeeze out more by controlling the political process—toppling unions, gaining subsidies, cutting their taxes, gaining offshore havens—and, perhaps most of all, by privatizating services like education, transportation, the military, security, Medicare and Social Security, health services, and many aspects of the natural commons, like fresh water. That’s their big new market: commodification of the commons.” [quoting from retired businessman Jack Santa Barbara]

Republicans and especially Tea Partiers are now also advocating for privatizing whole government agencies, even those providing welfare services, for example. It represents a very profound shift in corporate/state/oligarch strategy, and is potentially much more pervasive and dangerous. All of it has been made necessary by the reality of declining resources and the stunted growth potential of the usual means of wealth expansion. Through campaign contributions, this class of super-rich already “owns” many of the U.S. state houses and legislatures, the House of Representatives, and, as we said, an alarming number of U.S. senators. The election of 2012 has a fair chance to also bring them control of the Senate, and quite conceivably the presidency. If so, we should probably start calling it neofeudalism. A privatized country.

— Jerry Mander

— via jhnbrssndn

One size does not fit all: Context matters greatly, for Conscientious Extended, July 2012.

Quote | | Paul Greer

“We all know that all photography is fiction: as a photographer you make choices, which influence the photograph enough for it to be more of a fiction than a fact. That’s photography for you. That’s just the way it is. But the photojournalist’s task, no actually the photojournalist’s duty is to minimize the amount of fiction that enters her/his photography. We are quite aware of the problem in the news context – this is, after all, the context where the problems with image manipulation come up regularly – so we expect photographs in this context to be as truthful as they can be. The problem with InstaHip in this particular context is it adds a huge amount of fiction to photography, simply by its aesthetic.”

—Joerge Colbert
— via fette