1. "What we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical, attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life… and the prime cause is not vanity… but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower and lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass civilization."

    Henry Seidel Canby, 1926. Canby is remembered as a professor at Yale but yes he was raised as a Friend. The quote included in a presentation that the excellent Michael Wesch gave this week, The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube Culture and the Politics of Authenticity.