Frases de Neal Stephenson

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“Cualquiera que crezca viendo la televisión, que nunca vea nada de religión o filosofía, se críe en una atmósfera de relativismo moral, aprenda ética viendo escándalos sexuales en el telediario, y vaya a una universidad donde los posmodernos se desviven por demoler las nociones tradicionales de verdad y cualidad, va a salir al mundo como un ser humano bastante incapaz. Y, de nuevo, tal vez el fin de todo esto es hacernos incapaces, de modo que no nos bombardeemos mutuamente con armas nuclear.”

“Quiero que sigan siendo secretos mientras los hombres sean capaces del mal.”

“Si quieres que tus secretos sigan siéndolo más allá del fin de tu vida, debes ser futurista. Debes anticipar qué velocidad alcanzarán los ordenadores durante ese periodo. También debes estudiar la política. Porque si el planeta entero se convirtiese en una estado policial obsesionado con recuperar viejo secretos, puede que se dediquen vastos recursos al problema de factorizar grandes números compuestos.”

“Cuando vives en una choza en lo alto de una montaña rodeado de un montón de nativos que no hablan ninguna de la aproximadamente media docena de lenguas que tu conoces debes aprender a discutir contigo mismo.”

“Las decisiones realmente estúpidas son siempre las más fáciles.”

“Siempre ha sentido una especie de extraña y enfermiza fascinación por las mujeres que fuman o beben mucho. (…) personas demasiado ocupadas viviendo como para preocuparse en extender la esperanza de vida.”

“Cualquier idiota puede aprender a ejecutar más o menos los pasos básicos. Eso lleva media hora. Pero cuando ha pasado la media hora, los profesores de baile siempre esperan que te eches a volar y realices una de las milagrosas transiciones temporales que solo suceden en los musicales de Broadway, y que empieces a bailar con brillantez. Randy supone que a la gente que no se le dan bien las matemáticas se siente igual: el profesor escribe algunas ecuaciones simples en la pizarra, y diez minutos después esta derivando la velocidad de la luz en el vacío.”

“Algunos se quejan de que el correo electrónico es impersonal… que tu contacto conmigo, durante la fase por correo de nuestra relación, estuvo mediatizado por cables y pantallas. Algunos dirían que no es tan buen medio como charlar cara a cara. Y sin embargo, nuestra visión de las cosas siempre esta mediatizado por las corneas, retinas, nervios ópticos y cierta maquinaria neurológica que toma la información de nuestros nervios ópticos y la propagan a nuestra mente. Por tanto, ¿es inferior mirar palabras en la pantalla? Yo creo que no; al menos en ese caso eres conciente de la distorsión. Mientras que, cuando ves a alguien con tus propios ojos, te olvidas de la distorsión y te imaginas que tienes una experiencia pura e inmediata.”

“La jungla es un bonito sitio para ir de visita, pero no querrías vivir, o dejar de moverte, allí. (…) los insectos de la jungla te ven como grandes trozos de comida animada pero no muy bien defendida.”

“No sólo no nos ofenden las imágenes manufacturadas sino que nos gustan. Prácticamente insistimos en ello. Estamos ansiosos por ser cómplices de nuestro propio engaño: por pagar dinero por el pase a un parque temático, votar a un tipo que obviamente nos está mintiendo o permanecer de pie sosteniendo la cesta que se llena de cosméticos.”

“Hay algún patrón universal de acontecimientos que cuando se filtra a través del sistema sensorial y equipamiento de gente primitiva y supersticiosa, siempre genera las representaciones internas mentales que identifican con dioses, héroes, etc.”

“A los de Disney se le dan mejor que a nadie las experiencias mediadas. Si entendieran qué son los sistemas operativos, y por qué los usa la gente, aplastarían a Microsoft en uno o dos años.”

“Izzy estaba llena de gente que se orientaba hacia el extremo Asperger del espectro social y la mejor forma de hacerla hablar era preguntarle por algún detalle técnico.”

“Tiene la misma sensación de mareo, eléctrica, nauseabunda y hiperactiva que siempre convierte el combate en una experiencia tan estimulante.”

“Angustiarse es tan fundamentalmente patético que bordea lo gracioso.”

“Sobreestimar la inteligencia del enemigo es, en cualquier caso, más peligroso que infravalorarla.”

“Uno de los aspectos útiles del servicios militar es que te acostumbras a que hombres ruidosos y ordinarios te digan groserías.”

“Si quieres vivir y respirar mañana debes sumergirte en las profundidades oscuras hoy.”

“Vivir en una comuna donde los ideales de la paz, el amor y la armonía se mantenían de boquilla les había privado de válvulas de escape normales y socialmente admitidas para su obsesión, tendía a salir de otros modos, invariablemente más siniestros.”

“La palabra, al final, es el único sistema para codificar los pensamientos - el único medio - que no es fungible, que se niega a disolverse en el torrente devorador de los medios electrónicos.”

“Creo que lo que Camila quiere decir es que ciertos tipos de personalidad, si se llevan al extremo, son tan negativos como una enfermedad mental; si no peores”

“Antes de esta reunión escribí media docena de cartas de despedida a viejos amigos y familiares —dijo—, y cuando terminemos, voy a seguir con la lista. Quizá logre escribir la mitad de las cartas antes de que los destinatarios mueran por la Lluvia Sólida. Supongo que pretendo decir que pienso como el muerto andante que soy en realidad; y eso está mal. Debería estar pensando en lo que tú estás pensando: el futuro al que vosotros y algunos pocos más podréis aspirar si todo esto sale bien. —¿Crees”

“Henry, que en aquel momento tenía once años, no había prestado atención al proceso de elevar el imponente cohete hasta su posición vertical porque se distrajo viendo un par de perros callejeros copulando a unos cien metros del punto de lanzamiento. El”

“«Pelear no es cuestión de saber hacerlo, sino de decidir hacerlo.»”

“Había que humanizar los objetos, darles un nombre mono.”

“Nacida en Nueva York de padres huidos de la represión política en Chile.”

“Algunos dicen que la bipolaridad es una adaptación útil. Cuando las cosas van mal, te deprimes, te retiras, conservas energía. Cuando las cosas van bien, te mueves con gran energía. —¿Y”

“amística, un término acuñado hacía eones por un antropólogo moirano para referirse a las elecciones que hacían las diferentes culturas en cuanto a qué tecnologías formarían parte de su vida y cuáles no.”

“Pero el mundo no lo llevan científicos e ingenieros, ¿es lo que pretendes decir?”

“El desarrollo de software comparte con el deporte profesional la característica de lograr que los treintañeros se sientan decrépitos”

“Se podían haber planteado todo tipo de argumentos filosóficos sobre si ese enfoque era mejor o peor que lo que estaban haciendo en realidad, pero, en el fondo, la filosofía no contaba demasiado.”

“As far as culture and politics are concerned, the important theme is long-attention-span vs. short-attention-span thinking. I'm sure that your readers can think of any number of ways in which having a longer attention span can be useful. But I'll name one. Bankers with long attention spans don't lend money to people who can't pay it back. If we had more bankers who adopted a long-term view of their responsibilities, we might not be in the middle of a financial crisis that is blowing away 150-year-old investment banks.”

“"Ylma is having you work it out in the most gruesome way possible… so that when she teaches you how it's really done, it'll seem that much easier…. Like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer—it feels so good when you stop." This was the oldest joke in the world, but Barb hadn't heard it before, and he became so amused that he got physically excited and had to run back and forth across the kitchen several times to flame off energy. A few weeks ago, I would have been alarmed by this and would have tried to calm him down, but now I was used to it, and knew that if I approached him physically things would get much worse.”

“This isn’t the first. People have been making malware that does this for a few years now. There’s a word for it: ‘ransomware.”

“There’s no way to get from the point in Hemn space where we are now, to one that includes pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, following any plausible action principle. Which is really just a technical term for there being a coherent story joining one moment to the next. If you simply throw action principles out the window, you’re granting the world the freedom to wander anywhere in Hemn space, to any outcome, without constraint. It becomes pretty meaningless. The mind…knows that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next—that restricts our world’s path to points that tell an internally consistent story. So it focuses its worrying on outcomes that are more plausible…”

“Much pruning had taken place in recent weeks. I am now absent in many versions of the cosmos where you are present.”

“Neither of us said a word as we picked our way down the path for the next quarter of an hour, and the sky receded to a deep violet. I had the illusion that, as it got darker, it moved away from us, expanding like a bubble, rushing away at a million light-years an hour, and as it whooshed past stars, we began to see them.”

“Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.”

“Jim and his crew of a dozen or so specialize in loud, sloppy publicity seeking…. Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. That's partly because I'm younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing is toxics, not nukes or mammals. … there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic criminals.
You just plug the pipes.”

“Passing through the utility section [Ivy] considered getting herself a cup of coffee. Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee anyway and stepped into the Farm.”

“The “Meat” were there because of REAMDE, which had been present at background levels for several weeks now but that recently had pinballed through the elbow in its exponential growth curve and for about twelve hours had looked as though it might completely take over all computing power in the Universe, until its own size and rapid growth had caused it to run afoul of the sorts of real-world friction that always befell seemingly exponential phenomena and bent those hockey-stick graphs over into lazy S plots.”

“The corporations have already planted their own bombs. All we have to do is light the fuses.”

“Now he was far from bored but feeling many of the same stresses that had caused him to retire from active duty in the first place. Was it possible to find a station in life with just the right level of interest? Was it possible to be normal without being someone’s dupe?”

““We live in strange times. I’m fertile right now. I can tell. No more condoms for you, tiger."… [Doob] was already thinking about the videos he was going to make to teach his baby about calculus when he climaxed.”

““Do your neighbors burn one another alive?” was how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with Artisan Flec.
“Do your shamans walk around on stilts?” Fraa Orolo asked, reading from a leaf that, judging by its brownness, was at least five centuries old. Then he looked up and added helpfully, “You might call them pastors or witch doctors.”
“When a child gets sick, do you pray? Sacrifice to a painted stick? Or blame it on an old lady?”
“Do you fancy you will see your dead dogs and cats in some sort of afterlife?””

“It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels?
It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them. It also raises the question of why Microsoft is so bad at PR, when the history of Apple demonstrates that, by writing large checks to good ad agencies, you can plant a corporate image in the minds of intelligent people that is completely at odds with reality.”

“Richard resumed reading the T’Rain Gazette, a daily newspaper (electronic format, of course)… which summarized what had been going on all over T’Rain during the preceding twenty-four hours:
Notable achievements, wars, duels, sackings, mortality statistics, plagues, famines…untoward spikes in commodity prices.”

“These changes in identity and location can easily become nested inside each other, many layers deep, even if you aren't doing anything nefarious. Once you have forgotten who and where you are, the whoami command is indispensible.”

“The moon had broken up into seven large pieces, which inevitably became known as the Seven Sisters, and an uncountable number of smaller ones. Gradually the big ones acquired names. Doc Dubois was responsible for many of these. He gave them descriptive names that wouldn’t scare people. It wouldn’t do to call them Nemesis or Thor or Grond. So instead it was Potatohead, Mr. Spinny, Acorn, Peach Pit, Scoop, Big Boy, and Kidney Bean.”

“I don't like sewing machines. I don't understand how a needle with a thread going through the tip of it can interlock the thread by jamming itself into a little goddamn spool. It's contrary to nature and it irritates me.”

“Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity — it is, in a word, bourgeois — and so it attracts all of the same gripes.”

“The opening screen of T’Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel.”

“Give me an adventure. I’m not talking about some massive adventure. Just something that would make getting fired seem small. Something that I might remember when I’m old.”
“I can’t predict the future,” I said, “but based on what little I know so far, I’m afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing.”
“Great!”
“Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial.”

“People who claim they are motivated by the Purpose end up behaving differently—and generally better—than people who serve other masters,” Ty said.
“So it is like believing in God.”
“Maybe yes. But without the theology, the scripture, the pigheaded certainty.”

“He told us that a lone avout was being pursued by a mob. We saw it as an emergence.”

“This is a history, in that it intends to describe what happened and suggest why. … I may have fooled around with a few facts. But I served as witness until as close to the end as anyone could have … and so there is not so much art in this as to make it irrelevant.”

“Is this a real blue-collar bar or a simulacrum thereof?”
“Both. It started out as a pure simulacrum, a few years ago, before the economy crashed, when it was hip for twentysomethings to move down here and dress in Carhartts and Utilikilts. But they did such a good job of it that actual blue-collar people began to show up. And then the economy did crash, and the hip people discovered that they were, in actual point of fact, blue collar, and probably always would be. So you’ve got guys here who run lathes. But they have colored Mohawks and college degrees, and they program the lathes in computer languages. I was trying to come up with a name for them. Cerulean-collar workers, maybe.”
“Do a lot of people stop by here on their way to the private jet terminal?”
“You’d be surprised.”

“Very old money was behind the Crow’s Nest. And enough of it that its Owners didn’t mind losing some every month to keep the place going. It was a kind of eleemosynary institution, created to serve not culture and not dukh, but a thing called the Purpose. And if Ty kept working there for another few decades, perhaps one of the Owners would sit him down one day in the Bolt Hole and deign to tell him what exactly the Purpose was.”

“Both of them have seen many young Western men arrive here on business missions and completely lose control of their sphincters and become impediments to any kind of organized activity. Daily hired Wall because, like Daily, he is a stable family man who has his act together…and they seem to be making excellent progress toward their goal, which is to run two really expensive wires across the Malay Peninsula. They tend to be absolutely straight shooters…. Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today. On the other hand, if I had an unlimited amount of money and woke up tomorrow morning with a burning desire to see a 2,000-hole golf course erected on the surface of Mars, I would probably call men like Daily and Wall, do a handshake deal with them, send them a blank check, and not worry about it.”

“[Doc Dubois] had been focusing all of his attention in the other direction, on Peach Pit and its iron-rich “children,” PP1, PP2, and PP3, nailing down their exact orbital parameters, taking high-res photographs.
PP3 was especially interesting. It was a congealed glob of mostly iron, similar in composition to Amalthea. It was some fifty kilometers in diameter. And it had a deep cleft on one side, comparable in size to the Grand Canyon, apparently formed by a collision that had rent its outer skin while it was partly congealed. Doob had begun calling PP3 Cleft.”