Robert M. Pirsig, author and philosopher
Some times you should just let the really clever people say it, they’ve said it in the best way possible before. This is a critique of the information age if I ever saw one:
“‘What’s new?’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the questions ‘What is best?’, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and ‘best’ was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now.
Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.”
- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974
