a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
kleinbl00  ·  2595 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Green Beer & Rank Hypocrisy

No. It's William Gibson but it was from a rambling, off-script discussion in No Maps for These Territories.

It's worth watching... but you only need a little bit (you can start at 5:00) to see that it isn't a great source for pithy wisdom. The actual quote is something like I think that most people are most comfortable living about ten years back from the point in time at which we've arrived.

EDIT: Found it. 14:09. "I think that most people... myself included... are most comfortable conceptually living about 10 years back from whatever point in time we've reached and I think we all have these moments... that are vertiginous and terribly exciting and very frightening in which we realize the contemporary absolutely and I think it induces... terror and ecstasy and we retreat...we retreat from it because we can't stay... we can't stay in, in that state of panic which is... I think... the response to what's happening to us. We're more comfortable with an earlier version of who we were and what we were. It makes us feel more in control."

William Gibson is a hell of a writer and I reckon that if he were to write that, he'd write it "We are most comfortable living ten years in the past" but he's not, he's riding around in the back seat of a cab in Vancouver in 1999 chain-smoking cigarettes and shooting the shit with a dude with a DV camera.