“Connecting to the outernet was less of a shock this time, as the monitor gave him a sense of distance from it, but it was still annoying. How did these people live with such a system, stalked by advertisements and “free” offers and icons that would take you to another site, unasked-for, the moment you gave them your attention? It was like wending your way through an obstacle course. Perhaps after a while you just learned to tune it all out… or perhaps you could buy programs that did it for you. He would have to design himself one of those before he did any more real work on the outernet, though he suspected that the consumer programs which were stalking him were capable of adapting to anything he could turn out quickly.Advertising: the ultimate predator. He longed for the simplicity of the Gueran network, which simply did what it was supposed to and no more. When had these people lost touch with the fact that the purpose of a network was to facilitate communication, not impede it?”— C.S. Friedman
“No wonder the sky had to be blotted out by advertisements. The stars drowned with lights. If everyone could see beyond Coalition horizons, perhaps they’d see the titans of humanity for what they were: tiny creatures, smaller than insects, and in the scale of things, every bit as insignificant.”— S.J. Kincaid
“You could write the best book in the world but if nobody knows about it, it is nothing”— Brandon Reece Taylor
“Since the end of the postwar economic boom, certain strategies have been intensified to stimulate consumption, especially strategies aimed at American youth that project sexual activity as instant fulfillment and violence as the locus of machismo identity. This market activity has contributed greatly to the disorientation and confusion of American youth, and those with less education and fewer opportunities bear the brunt of this cultural chaos.”— Cornel West
“Together, they read on his papers a survey of the most common words found in suicide notes and mass murder letters. Shame had come up over fifty times. Anger, thirty times. Corona, once. Heineken, once. Beer, thrice. On the next page, an advertisement by the National Health Board with the message “Unable to cry? Call us now.”— Sihan Tan
“You cannot intimidate people with real bullets, but you can intimidate them with fake gun.”— Amit Kalantri