David Pennington

“You should never ask an artist about their art,” Maurizio Cattelan said, immediately on arrival. “The best art raises lots and lots of questions,” he added. “Not answers.”

Memes aren’t an external influencing factor on culture – they’re endemic, a way for culture to express itself, like the technology of language or cave paintings.

This is intelligence. Not in the IQ sense, but in the "I know what matters" sense. In the "I know who I am without the algorithm telling me" sense.

Trend is not inherently bad. But when you build your identity around it, you become a vessel for the algorithm—not a creator of your own world.

Most of modern life is designed to get you out of your deepest self and into your head, where you are more vulnerable to anxiety (the grease between the wheels of technocratic capitalism).

“Imagine if you owned the Lakers or the Yankees, and put all the emphasis on the team brand—but kept reducing the pay to actual players.”

Something is deeply wrong when we sext the same way we order a sandwich.

If the early internet was serving beer and wine that brought people together, today’s internet is dealing crack and fentanyl that tears people apart. The consumer isn’t winning when they are addicted to a product that makes them unhappy, and when they are spending hours each day using products they would pay money to make disappear.