The Shakespeare quote is, "We are consumed by that which we are nourished by" [sic]. [Editor's note: Shakespeare's Sonnet LXXIII — "Consumed with that which it was nourished by."]

I think when we're texting, on the phone, doing your e-mail, getting information, the experience is of being filled up. And that feels good. We assume that it is nourishing in the sense of taking us to a place we want to go. And I think that we are going to start to learn that in our enthusiasms and in our fascinations, we can also be flattened and depleted by what perhaps was once nourishing us, but which can't be a steady diet, because speaking for myself, if all I do is my e-mail, my calendar and my searches, ... I feel great; I feel like a master of the universe. And then it's the end of the day, I've been busy all day, and I haven't thought about anything hard, and I have been consumed by the technologies that were there and that had the power to nourish me.

The point is we're really at the very beginning of learning how to use this technology in the ways that are the most nourishing and sustaining. We're going to slowly find our balance, but I think it's going to take time, and I think the first discipline is to think of us in the early days so that we're not so quick to — (snaps fingers) — yes, no, on, off, good, good, and to just kind of take it slowly and not feel that we need to throw out the virtues of deliberateness, living in life, stillness, solitude.

There is a wonderful Freudian formulation, which is that loneliness is failed solitude. In many ways, we are forgetting the intellectual and emotional value of solitude. You're not lonely in solitude. You're only lonely if you forget how to use solitude to replenish yourself and to learn. And you don't want a generation that experiences solitude as loneliness. And that is something to be concerned about, because if kids feel that they need to be connected in order to be themselves, that's quite unhealthy. They'll always feel lonely, because the connections that they're forming are not going to give them what they seek.

t]he earth — the deterritorialized, the glacial, the giant molecule — is abody without organs. this body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles. [tp: 40]
for there simultaneously occurs upon the earth a very important, inevitable phenomenon that is beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many others: stratification. [tp: 40]

the earth is the primitive, savage unity of desire and production. for the earth is not merely the multiple and divided object of labour, it is also the unique, indivisible entity, the full body that falls back on the forces of production and appropriates them for its own as the natural or divine precondition. while the ground can be the productive element and the result of appropriation, the earth is the great unengendered stasis, the element superior to production that conditions the common appropriation and utilization of the ground. it is the surface on which the whole process of production is inscribed, on which the forces and means of labour are recorded, and the agents and the products distributed. it appears here as the quasi cause of production and the object of desire (it is on the earth that desire becomes bound to its own repression). [ao: 141]

the primitive territorial machine, with its immobile motor, the earth, is already a social machine, a megamachine, that codes the flows of production, the flows of means of production, of producers and consumers: the full body of the goddess earth gathers to itself the cultivable species, the agricultural implements, and the human organs. [ao: 142]

Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now rely on "external brains" (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves.

The universe is an intelligence test.
- Timothy Leary