whisperthatruns:

“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.”

— Susan Sontag, On Photography

(via moodgored)

violentwavesofemotion:

Curiosity is good and valid but it can also get pretty empty when it doesn’t really stem from an honest place. I stan for inquisitiveness over curiosity any day. Open, perceptive inquisitiveness. To ask the right questions in relation to oneself and in relation to the world makes room for a sense of understanding which is higher, more internal and personal.