(38 Days to go until the end of the people’s century)
The past is necessarily inferiour to the future. That is how we wish it to be. How could we acknowledge any merit in our most dangerous enemy? This is how we deny the past and how we cooperate with the victorious who hold the world firm in its web of speed.
FT. Marinetti, the futurist, 1913.
The term “Asian” only came into currency after the Second World War, for reasons that are obscure.
Eric Hobsbawn 1994
What, indeed, were international powers, old or new, at the end of the millennium? The only state left that would have been recognised as a great power, in the sense in which the word had been used in 1914, was the USA. What this meant in practice was quite obscure. Russia had been reduced to the size it had been in the mid-seventeenth century.
Eric Hobsbawn, 1994
the death of email
...at first it was sexy, then it became banal. At first it promised that you would be noticed, then it promised that you would be ignored. At first email gave you access to exotic places and important people, then it became the least effective way to communicate.
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