David Pennington

“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

It is a mistake and a misreading of nature to think that you, a living creature, will be flourishing all the days of your life.

I do not want to be in the business of manipulating your split-second attention.

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.

If Aldous Huxley had known about endlessly scrolling short videos from a handheld device, he would have made it the preferred media interface of his Brave New World .

He wisely understood—unlike Orwell or Bradbury—that ruling elites don’t need censorship and book-burning if they can convince people to voluntarily abandon literacy.

he stories you can tell in a film are a fraction of what you can do in a book. What's irritating is that you then do these things, and films have their own kind of structure. The thing dictates certain paces, no matter what you do. That's only because we're trying to make a film that reaches people; I mean I don't try to make a film for me -- I can... See more