Miss Brunner: “You look ahead.”

Jerry Cornelius: “I look around. Ahead is here already.”

Michael Moorcock: The Final Programme (Book 1 of the Cornelius Quartet)

...because that William Gibson quote is so, like, yesterday.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

H. L. Mencken

“A high and strong culture is declining, but at the same time and in the same sphere new things are being born. The tide is turning, and the tone of life is about to change.”

Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages

“When studying any period, we are always looking for the promise of what the next is to bring.”

Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

J K Galbraith: How Keynes Came to America

There can indeed be no common explanation of why the world twice bound itself to the wheel of mass war-making as long as historians disagree about the logic and morality of politics and whether the first is the same as the second.

A more fruitful, though less well-trodden, approach to the issue of causes lies along another route: that which addresses the question of how the two World Wars were made possible rather than why they came about.

John Keegan: The Second World War, Chapter 1

Oligarchies are seldom destroyed and more frequently commit suicide.

Donald Mackay, 11th Lord Reay, during the 1909 House of Lords debate on Lloyd George's Peoples Budget.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Cory Doctorow:  Tiktok's enshittification

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.

Alasdair Gray: Lanark (adapted from Dennis Lee)

And best of all is finding a place to be in the early days of a better civilization

Dennis Lee: Civil Elegies