Quotes About Technology

We're still in the honeymoon phase of connectivity. Governments and corporations are punch-drunk on our data, and the rush to connect everything is driven by an even greater desire for power and market share.

I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.

The reader is not a "customer" of Facebook because he never paid for Facebook. Facebook's genuine customers are the marketers – those who pay Facebook for the hard labour of surveilling the billion people on Facebook. Facebook is one of the "Big Five" of Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple.

Google created Google+ as its effort to steal Facebook's oxygen, but it turns out that social networks aren't commodities.

The Internet of Things is not about a talking refrigerator, because that is the old-fashioned consumer retail world of electrical white goods. It's an archaic concept, like software bought in a plastic-wrapped box from a shelf. The genuine Internet of Things wants to invade that refrigerator, measure it, instrument it, monitor any interactions with it; it would cheerfully give away a fridge at cost.

Brixie wasn't talking to him, or listening to him. Nothing like that at all. Brixie was off in her own world, flaming away like a blowtorch. She was such an Internet fiend that she had never learned any other way to behave.»

but they'd have a cheap laptop and some big chunk of the Library, and they'd crouch under a culvert with it, and peck around on it and fly around in it and read stuff and annotate it and hypertext it, and then they'd come up with some pathetic, shattered, crank, loony, paranoid theory as to what the hell had happened to them and their planet…. It almost beat drugs for turning smart people into human wreckage.

The digital revolution reduces everybody to the state of musicians.

The Internet of Things makes no attempt to redress, or even address, the many real problems that the internet brought to the world. On the contrary, it's an international effort to bring everything that wasn't internet within the purview of the techno-elite that currently dominates the internet.

Microsoft, for its part, will cheerfully run the search engine Bing at a loss, for the sake of hampering Google's freedom of action.

The Net was a lot like television, another former wonder of the age. The Net was a vast glass mirror. It reflected what it was shown. Mostly human banality. ?

The Internet of Things is not a capitalist marketplace. It's a new platform for radically broadening digital activity.

The Internet of Things is supposed to be invisible to all but its corporate and military masters. But the Internet itself is hugely obvious and famous—because, even though the Internet is also corporate and military in its origins, for about a decade the Internet was all anybody talked about.

The internet brought many laudable things, but prosperity, stability, accountability and honest politics were not four of them.

That doesn't mean that the Internet of Things will triumph, because, in some ways, it can't win. It's too broad and vague to win; it's a huge, looming infrastructural phenomenon, much like "electrification" or "automation" once were. People never voted to become electrical or automated.

There is no power-group of consequence in the world today that successfully renounces smartphones. No one who matters refuses what they offer.

The Internet of Things has a slight utopian tinge, but mostly it has a certain melancholy, even grim air. It's not some psychedelic exploration of the cyberspace of the digital. It's material labour, it's hardware, it's a hard slog.

in the bowels of this nameless little world, is a genetic technology that feeds itself, maintains itself, runs itself, efficiently, endlessly, mindlessly. It's the perfect organic tool. The faction that could use these tireless workers could make itself an industrial titan.

People who might once have bought a newspaper to beguile themselves now look at their Android. Magzines readers look at their Android, too. Amazingly, even manufactures of chewing gum have taken a hit, because nervously chewing while staring out the window has become nervously tapping while staring into a handled screen.

My IQ? No. I can't read," she said proudly. "But I'm Rep One, the majority whip in the House. And I'm married to Senator One.

Community and anarchy. Politics pulls things together; technology blows them apart.

All workable standards of wealth had vaporized, digitized, and vanished into a nonstop hurricane of electronic thin air.

He loved Dottie, but he and Dottie always got along best by e-mail. E-mail was how he had first asked her out. E-mail was how they carried out their professional lives and coordinated their schedules. They often sent each other e-mail over the breakfast table when they were living inside the same house. They'd decided to have a child by e-mail. They'd been talking over e-mail about having another one.

But the economy's out of control. Money just doesn't need human beings anymore. Most of us only get in the way.