In Cultural Revolution v2.0, not using the green app in the Red Dynasty is the same crime as not wearing the Emperor’s likeness on your chest in Cultural Revolution v1.0.

Some people measure everything by profit and loss, and take virtue as a joke. Lennon answered with his song: “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” It was a song from 1971.

My world is not in the lowlands. The lowlands are a foreign land.

Petty emperors only need to feel how others treat them. They never need to feel how others feel.

Creation comes from the piece that doesn’t fit the spec. Screws don’t strike sparks off each other; for sparks to fly, the shapes have to differ. A place that can’t tolerate people who are different ends up with nothing but standard parts. This is true of people, and just as true of products.

Tools are for those who know how to use them.

What earns a person contempt is their conduct and cognition, never their name or face. There is one exception: in a civilizational backwater, that veneer can cover every ugliness.

Algorithms and censorship together have shaped the collective mediocrity of today’s atomized society.

When the real is systematically destroyed, the void it leaves doesn’t disappear — it’s filled by the fake. And those who grow up inside the system often don’t know they’re living with substitutes. They think it’s the real thing.

Kurt Cobain said he’d rather be hated for who he is than loved for who he is not. Under certain systems, everything comes in a castrated version, including people.

In this world, there is a difference between the internet and the harm-net, between Thai Forest Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism, between the natural person and the processed person, between Claude and Doubao.

Free love is a game for citizens, not for serfs — arranged marriage is the native system of the serf.

A person blind to the evil in software, the evil in systems, can hardly be called virtuous.

Things that are truly alive need time to settle, to grow, to be understood.