“[Keanu] Reeves said a recent conversation about “The Matrix” with a 15-year-old put things into a terrifying perspective. The actor explained to the teenager that his character, Neo, is fighting for what’s real. The teenager scoffed and said, “Who cares if it’s real?” “People are growing up with these tools: We’re listening to music already that’s made by AI in the style of Nirvana, there’s NFT digital art,” Reeves said. “It’s cool, like, Look what the cute machines can make! But there’s a corporatocracy behind it that’s looking to control those things. Culturally, socially, we’re gonna be confronted by the value of real, or the non-value. And then what’s going to be pushed on us? What’s going to be presented to us?” “It’s this sensorium. It’s spectacle. And it’s a system of control and manipulation,” Reeves continued. “We’re on our knees looking at cave walls and seeing the projections, and we’re not having the chance to look behind us.””
The Barbie Movie is the movie of all time for many reasons, but the core message being “Perfoming gender roles hurts everyone, you should be your authentic self no matter what society says” really knocked it out of the park
If culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.
Khaled Hosseini, from And the Mountains Echoed, 21 may 2013
The gaze, human or animal, is a
powerful thing. When we look at something, we decide to fill our entire
existence, however briefly, with that very thing. To fill your whole world with
a person, if only for a few seconds, is a potent act. And it can be a dangerous
one. Sometime we are not seen enough, and other times we are seen too thoroughly,
we can be exposed, seen through, even devoured. Hunters examine their prey
obsessively in order to kill it. The line between desire and elimination, to
me, can be so small. But that is who we are. There must be some beauty—and if
not beauty, meaning—in that brutal power.
—Poet and novelist Ocean Vuong, from
“Survival as a Creative Force: An Interview with Ocean Vuong,” in The Paris
Review
