Quotes from Manuel De Landa

Any materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds.

Imperfect knowledge, incomplete assessment of feedback, limited memory and recall, as well as poor problem-solving skills result in a form of rationality that attains not optimal decisions but more or less satisfactory compromises between conflicting constraints.

The very idea of massified advertising meant that large cirulation newpapers were not in the business of selling information to people but rather of selling the attention of their readers to commercial concerns... to tap into the resorvoir of resources constitutred by the growing urban populations

But [in bureaucracies], too, decision making takes place in a world full of unceratinties. Any actual system of information processing, planning and control will never be optimal but merely practical, applying rote responses to recurrent problems and employing a variety of contingency tactics to deal with unforeseen events.

This admittedly simplified description of society as an assemblage of assemblages should serve as a reminder of how misleading it is to view human history as comprising a single temporal flow. Indeed, given that even at the largest scales (territorial states, world-economies) we never reach a point at which we may coherently speak of 'society as a whole', the very term 'society' should be regarded as a convenient expression lacking a referent.

The content has both form and substance: for example, the form is prison and the substance is those that are locked up, the prisoners . . . The expression also has a form and a substance: for example, the form is penal law and the substance is 'delinquency' in so far as it is the object of statements.