Mashups Quotes

“The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book.

The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them.

The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“Snow came back, but she didn't come back right.”
― Rob E. Boley, That Risen Snow: Snow White & Zombies

“Magic is a naughty beast.”
― Rob E. Boley, That Wicked Apple: Snow White & Even More Zombies

“Let's make a game of it, shall we?" she said. "Whoever kills the most, wins."
"I will kill twenty!" Lydia declared.
"I will kill thirty!" Kitty countered.
Mary paused for a moment of sober calculation.
"I will kill thirty-two." she said.
"I will kill as long as I must," said Jane.
"And I will kill as long as I can," said Elizabeth”
― Steve Hockensmith

“Mrs Bennet was a great connoissuer of feminine beauty and indeed it must be owned that she herself was a very handsome woman. As to the sweetness of her temper, there was less compelling evidence; yet in all her forty years she had given none of her family or general acquaintance reason to suppose her a murderess.”
― Debbie Cowens, Murder & Matchmaking

“To kids coming of age in a world of technology and unhinged capitalism, our music seems to sound the way global capital is — liquid, international, porous, and sped up.”
― Jace Clayton, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture