Quotes by Dave Eggers

He handed Mae a piece of paper, on which hed written, in crude all capitals, a list of assertions under the headline The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age. Mae scanned it, catching passages: We must all have the right to anonymity. Not every human activity can be measured. The ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of any endeavour is catastrophic to true understanding. The barrier between public and private must remain unbreachable. At the end she found one line, written in red ink: We must all have the right to disappear.

Surveillance shouldnt be the tradeoff for any goddamn service we get.

It was like setting up a guillotine in the public square.You dont expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it.

You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it [dignity]. Its never dignified, always brutal. Whats dignified about dying? Its never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And its fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it.

Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didnt our parents tell us about the weight?—What weight?—The fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If were vessels, and we are, then we, you and I, are overfull, and that means shes at the bottom of a deep cold lake. How can she stand the hissing of all that water?—We are not vessels; we are missiles.—Were static and were empty. We are overfull and leaden.—We are airtight and we are missiles and all-powerful.

Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything.

Dear Producers, Something is radiating deep within me and it must be transmitted or I will implode and the world will suffer a great loss, unawares. Epic are the proportions of my soul, yet without a scope who cares am I? This is why I must but must be one of the inhabitants of MTVs Real World. Only there, burning brightly into a million dazzled eyes, will my as yet uncontoured self assume the beauteous forms that are not just its own, but an entire market niches, due. I am a Kirk Cameron-Kurt Cobain figure, roguishly quirky, dandified but down to earth, kooky but comprehensible; denizen of the growing penumbra between alternative and mainstream culture; angsty prophet of the already bygone apocalypse, yet upbeat, stylish and sexy!Oscar Wilde wrote, Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating... [they] live the poetry [they] cannot write. As with Dorian Gray, life is my art! Oh MTV, take me, make me, wake me from my formless slumbers and place me in the dreamy Real World of target marketing.

We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. Its almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.

Why shouldn’t your curiosity about the world be rewarded?

I wondered quickly if Id give my life so that a dragon could live. If someone offered me that deal, your life for the existence of dragons.I thought maybe yes, maybe no.

Thank you, he says.Thank who?I dont know.

People worried about our passing over into some robotic state, but we were so much like robots already, programmed and easy to manipulate.

The issue is complex, but like many matters in Sudan, it is not as complex as Khartoum would want the west to believe.

Yousef had been lighthearted during his questions, but there was something very serious and sad under his smile, and Alan knew what it was. It was the knowledge that there would be no fighting, and there would be no struggle, no stand taken, and that the two of them, because they were not lacking materially, because despite injustices in their countries they were the recipients of preposterous bounty, would likely do nothing. They were content, they had won. The fighting would be done by others, elsewhere.

So many of the things I invented I honestly did for fun, out of some perverse game of whether or not they’d work, whether people would use them. I mean, it was like setting up a guillotine in the public square. You don’t expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it

That’s what’s new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that’s over. Completion is the end. We’re closing the circle around everyone—it’s a totalitarian nightmare.

You look at pictures of Nepal, push a smile button, and you think that’s the same as going there.

If things continue this way, there will be two societies - or at least I hope there will be two - the one youre helping create, and an alternative to it. You and your ilk will live, willingly, joyfully, under constant surveillance, watching each other always, commenting on each other, voting and liking and disliking each other, smiling and frowning, and otherwise doing nothing much else.

I mean, all this stuff youre involved in, its all gossip. Its people talking about each other behind their backs. Thats the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. And besides that, its fucking dorky.

When youre in your twenties in a new city where no ones from here, were all sort of orphans. The only people that you can count on our bunch of people that you work with and that you know. Youre only as good as the reliability of that latticework.