$500 Shadow Statue my Beloved

Every time I see a Van Gogh that’s not one of his better known pieces it absolutely blows me away

The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.

"From these made-up horrors, these fictionalized enemies, he had created a villain worthy of the violent bravado that he imagined he would display if confronted by said villain. This web of racist lies was what he needed to make himself seem like a man. He invented a story about bad guys who were out to get him, and he repeated it to himself and others until he believed it. Then he made up another story- of himself as hero, defending himself and his family against this violent threat- and he repeated that one until he believed it too. Brian wrote himself into his own American westen, a world of cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers. And for a man with no job, few friends, and a family that couldn't stand him, pretending to be a main character in violent American mythology was as close to belonging as he was ever going to get."

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”