Saying the words “the world needs more love” — using those words as a political device to imply that love all round is going to produce equality — is ignorant and unrealistic. The problem with the world is not that people who are different don’t have enough “love” for each other. The problem is that the people with power insist on using it, and maintaining it for themselves. Ultimately, when people say “we need more love,” what they are telling oppressed people is that they need to love the person that’s killing them. And what do they have to gain from that? A clear conscience? Some promise that in the afterlife, after they’ve been murdered by the people taking resources from them, that they’ll go to heaven because they have warmth in their hearts? ... Emphasizing love is a waste of time. What we need to emphasize is the dissemination of power, and a deconstruction of hierarchical structures that keep people at the bottom, and keep others at the top.

Technology is the active human interface with the material world. But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.

Do not think of yourself as a small, compressed, suffering thing. Think of yourself as graceful and expanding, no matter how unlikely it may seem at the time.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.