Creativity Quote by Brian Eno

Eno torpedoes a feel-good slogan that’s become almost mandatory in globalized culture: the idea that connectivity automatically equals solidarity. Calling it “such a drag” is doing a lot of work. It’s not a rejection of empathy so much as a refusal of the bland, corporate version of it - the TED-talk oneness that flattens friction into a mission statement. In Eno’s mouth, “no more distances” isn’t liberation; it’s the death of texture.

The subtext is deeply musical. Eno built a career out of treating difference as an engine: odd timbres, unfamiliar systems, accidents, constraints. He knows that interesting sound comes from edges - from things not lining up. So when he says “I like differences,” he’s defending the productive awkwardness that homogenizing narratives try to smooth away. “We are all brothers” is the kind of phrase that can feel generous while quietly demanding assimilation: speak the shared language, adopt the shared tastes, shop the same platforms, agree on the same moral vocabulary.

Context matters: Eno came of age as mass media and later the internet promised a borderless village, even as that village increasingly meant the same few cultural pipelines everywhere. His crankiness reads less like cynicism than like an artist’s warning. A world without distance can still be unequal, and a world without difference is rarely peaceful - it’s just easier to manage. Difference, for Eno, isn’t a problem to solve. It’s the raw material that keeps culture alive.