Brian Eno in conversation with Finn Williams - on architecture, city planning, the big here and the long now.
"We're addicted to stimulus. The whole thing about using your phone all the time is to get a little hit. Like endlessly snacking and never actually having a meal."
Discussing @stewartbrand's How Buildings Learn
"You don't finish a building, you start it. That has become a very important idea for me in terms of music as well. Trying to make pieces that are sort of organisms that then have a life separate rom you."
"You don't finish a building, you start it. That has become a very important idea for me in terms of music as well. Trying to make pieces that are sort of organisms that then have a life separate rom you."
"We decided that we both like bureaucrats. They get a bad deal because they don't look as glamorous as artists but actually what they're doing is sort of stabilising knowledge and arrangements, making consensus, keeping things running. And sometimes innovating quite radically"
Reading list on the table
On scenius and the ecology of ideas - "Think of Bletchley Park, or the Manhattan Project, or Xeroc PARC. The closer you get to them, the less easy it is to distinguish and separate out key figures. They seem to be the result of the whole turmoil there."
On Le Corbusier's cities of the future: "That's where you can say there's no such thing as society. That would really kill any chance of it."
"The point is the complexity of the forces that have molded the place. If the only force is Le Corbusier's brain, then you get something as simplistic as that. But usually in old cities there's such a multitude of forces that are absolutely the opposite of that."
"I missed a chance to beat Ayn Rand over the head. You must never pass up a chance to do that."
"Finland, by agreement with nearly every teacher I've ever spoken to, is reckoned to be an incredibly effective education system. Why doesn't anybody else copy them? Why are we so proud that we can't just say 'you know what, that's a bloody good idea'?" 🇫🇮
"I've for years been wondering why the interfaces of computers are designed to reduce us to a level of stupidity. We represent several million years of muscular evolution. We're incredibly fine machines. And what does that translate into?"
Good question in the end on The Clock Of The Long Now being funded by Jeff Bezos' Amazon money - "an incredibly short-termist company".
