“Equity, worth and time working are all mixed up if you are a founder.

“For the typologist, the type (eidos) is real and the variation an illusion, while for the populationist the type (average) is an abstraction and only the variation is real.

“Reasons to invest in social features for your website:
* Amplify customer opinion, more customer trust
* More data
* Cheaper support; issues are public

“In a rapidly growing market, you don’t worry too much about efficiency. It’s more important to grow fast. If there’s some mundane problem getting in your way, and there’s a simple solution that’s somewhat expensive, just take it and get on with more important things. Unions were just Razorfish in the mid twentieth century.

“Lots of us [academics], pushed to show ‘productivity’, don’t work on issues we regard as worthwhile and publish the results to advance work in the field – we pick fields in which it will be easy to publish and select issues to work on in the interest of ‘getting publications’. Even ass-backwarder, instead of being valued because they make scholarly work more readily available, journals are valued because the print medium restricts the amount of work that can be made publicly available, so that a publication ‘counts’.

“..genres of novels appear together in clusters [in time], separated by about 25 years, and disappear together too.

“There is a weird emphasis here on names, writing, and, near the climax, the autonomous power of language itself; this tempts me to postulate some kind of run-in with post-structuralism in Sagara’s past (not a happy one, given her heroine’s attitude towards teachers), but really anyone who comes to this looking for specifically Derridean high fantasy would be disappointed. (Not that I can think of anyone who would, now that Chun the Unavoidable is no longer among us.)

“She won’t be that much of a dick.

“One had no time to think. There was so much going on. The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway.

How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? I do not know, I do not see, even now. To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. ..it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. in your own community, you speak privately to you colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further.. So you wait, and you wait.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. You have gone almost all the way yourself.