“What is freedom?" he asked bitterly, "and who is truly free? We are all bound by what we are, and where we come from.""Maybe," I said slowly as I considered the turn my life had taken, the lies I had been told, "because we do not look farther than where we have been told to look. Perhaps it would all be different if we weren't afraid of what we are. Or what we might become.”

“What did it mean for us? Because everything I did, everything that happened to me, that was what I asked myself - what does this mean for us. It meant that I was farther away from you, different. It meant that if we let ourselves, we could get closer than we had ever been. Disappear into each other. You’d bleed and I wouldn’t. Then we both would.”

“When Thoreau considered "where I live and what I live for," he tied together location and values. Where we live doesn't just change how we live; it informs who we become. Most recently, technology promises us lives on the screen. What values, Thoreau would ask, follow from this new location? Immersed in simulation, where do we live, and what do we live for?”

“So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what’s been taken from us or what poison we’ve internalized or how hard we’ve had to work to expel it –– we all get to dream.”

“We ask [ of the computer ] not just about where we stand in nature, but about where we stand in the world of artefact. We search for a link between who we are and what we have made, between who we are and what we might create, between who we are and what, through our intimacy with our own creations, we might become.”

“But two years into our parties, I surveyed the scene from the corner and wondered, Why are we having these parties? What were we making, coming together like that? We were trying to prove that we had everything because we had parties, but I began to feel like we had nothing but parties. If anyone from the future could look back on what we were building, I was sure they would say, That could only have been built by slaves.”