After my post on the SciFi world we live in, I decided to start reading Doom Patrols. I’ve stalled at Chapter 7, but have saved some select quotes to share.

from Chapter 2:

We used to wonder whether machines could pass the Turing test, and fool an outside observer into thinking they were human. But the real question is rather whether we humans can pass the productivity test, and prove ourselves to be as loyal and effective service industry workers as are androids.

…

The point is not to resist by clinging to older visions and values–a mistake made alike by the survivalist Right and the communitarian Left. Let us rather push further and further, into ever new landscapes of simulation and delusion. Our only chance lies in this: to remake ourselves over and over again, frenetically chasing fashion, keeping up with state-of-the-art technology, and always being sure to purchase (or steal) the latest upgrades

from Chapter Five:

Postmodern human beings need images, just as junkies need heroin, just as all mammals need oxygen to breathe. Tolerance increases as time goes by: you require ever more images, ever more stimuli, ever more intensive extractions of surplus value, merely for your body to survive in its excited or narcotized state.

from Chapter Six:

The Joker responds to the “chaotic barrage” of his overloaded senses–the postmodern information glut–in a radically new manner. Not by choosing and discriminating among his perceptions; and not by striving to maintain a fixed ego structure. But simply by “going with the flow”; he immerses himself in the postmodern flux and just lets it all happen.

…

His great adaptive innovation is to hold nothing back; he lives and enjoys the postmodern condition, this mutation of our sensibility into non-linear, non-Euclidean forms. Far from being mad, the Joker may in fact represent “some kind of super-sanity… a brilliant new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century.”

…

This is the Joker’s random drift, a delirious passivity brilliantly adapted to our state of continual technological shock. With innovation running at so fast a pace, alienation is out of date.