“For all the grandiose talk about The Light Of Consciousness and The Future Of Humanity that has come out of Silicon Valley during its ascent, what it has delivered has mostly been spectacularly useless, lifeless, and anti-human. In this sense, it reflects its owners perfectly.”
“Semafor’s dinky plan to publish duller, subhead-laden versions of whatever you can read in the Times or Politico is the sort of unserious half-measure that would only sound good to the class of people who write checks for this kind of thing.”
“Looking back, what I had actually done is uncover evidence of the video’s supposed legacy, rather than evidence of the inciting incident. I assumed that because multiple people independently told me the same thing, that thing was true.”
“Both stars of the video had been telling opposite sides of the same funny anecdote for more than 25 years, unaware of who to thank for their respective brushes with fame.”
“I can see you out there, skipping the pasta water steps of pasta preparation — the reserving some of the starchy pasta water, and the tossing the cooked pasta and sauce with the pasta water to bring everything together. I can see you, being skeptical of the necessity of these steps. I see it! It makes me sick.”