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Deeply lost in the night. Just as one sometimes lowers one's head to reflect, thus to be utterly lost in the night. All around people are asleep. It's just play acting, an innocent self-deception, that they sleep in houses, in safe beds, under a safe roof, stretched out or curled up on mattresses, in sheets, under blankets [...] Why are you watching? Someone must watch, it is said. Someone must be there.
weird but kinda cool
[...] thrust its beak through my mouth, deep into me. Falling back, I was relieved to feel him drowning irretrievably in my blood, which was filling every depth, flooding every shore.
'Alas,' said the mouse, 'the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.' 'You only need to change your direction,' said the cat, and ate it up.
[...] But back I cannot go, this waste of time, this admission of having been on the wrong track would be unbearable for me. What? Run downstairs in this brief, hurried life accompanied as it is by that impatient droning? Impossible. The time allotted to you is so short that if you lose one second you have already lost your whole life, for it is no longer, it is always just as long as the time you lose. [...] As long as you don't stop climbing, the stairs won't end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards.
[...] I talked on as if I had still some prospect of putting everything right again by my talk, by the advantageous offers I made--I was myself alarmed by the concessions I granted, concessions that had not even been asked for. [...]
the salesman trying to sell to a man whose son is ill, possibly dying, right next to them
Then I descended the stairs: The descent was more tiring than the ascent had been, and not even that had been easy. Oh, how many business calls come to nothing, and yet one must keep going.
Albert Camus once said that 'the whole of Kafka's art consists in compelling the reader to re-read him.' Since the interpretations of Kafka are many and the search for the meaning of his stories seemingly endless, the reader will return to the story itself in the hope of finding guidance from within. Thus a second reading will--hopefully--become a commentary on the first, and subsequent readings will--again hopefully--shed light on the preceding ones. [...]
[...] These were actual living humans—I keep coming back to this—not only adopting but insisting upon the priority of a monstrous legal construct designed for the express purpose of annihilating all concerns but its own profit.
I feel like I am not doing a great job of capturing, in words, the dread that this produces in me. Across the room, one of my dogs is licking its asshole with intense fervor; it is making sounds like the stirring of a pot of macaroni and cheese. Also, large bees are thumping loudly off the glass of the window with arrhythmic regularity. Both of these are very distracting; I am having a hard time doing the thing that makes me money. If I were a corporation, the spectrum of possible responses to these distractions would include killing my dog and encasing my home in soundproofed concrete; that spectrum would be ordered by the degree to which each option maximized my blogging efficiency and by nothing else; what mediated the preferability of these extreme responses would not be concerns that they were cruel or might diminish the simple human pleasure of having nice, big windows to look through on a sunny day. Alas, I am a human—I cannot be a corporation, and a corporation cannot be me—so the dog gets to live. For now.
But the point is: You are not the corporation. You are the human. It is okay for the corporation to lose a small portion of what it has in terrifying overabundance (money, time, efficiency) in order to preserve what a human has that cannot ever be replaced (dignity, humanity, conscience, life). It is okay for you to prioritize your affinity with your fellow humans over your subservience to the corporation, and to imagine and broker outcomes based on this ordering of things. It is okay for the corporation to lose. It will return to its work of churning the living world into dead sand presently.
That might seem like much for an adventure romp like Ready Player One, an entertaining bit of spun sugar that is so amiably unchallenging that it never even makes demands of itself. But direct any back at it, and you come up with nothing, an empty politics, characters as flat as Pong, an epic of nostalgia for things people bought that never wonders why it loves what it loves. As a body of work, it’s a hollowed-out and varnished cadaver, held together by tissue only skin-deep; a Humpty-Dumpty man ready to shatter when pierced by a single question.
The roots of insurrection grow and feed on the same old crippling capitalism. In order to defeat the faceless evil corporation bent on charging people money and profaning the OASIS with ads, Parzival essentially becomes a series of ads, while he and his pals all become brands. The war of liberation against top-down commodity is self-commodity.