Quotes About Technology

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.

For over against the convenience of instantaneous communication is the fact that the great economical abstractions of writing, reading, and drawing, the media of reflective thought and deliberate action, will be weakened.

By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.

Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.

The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.

The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.

Now, the whole picture of 'backwardness' changes as soon as we cease to judge earlier technologies by the provincial standards of our own power-centered culture, with its worship of the machine, its respect for the uniform, the mass-produced, the mass-consumed, and with its disregard for individuality, variety and choice, except in strict conformity to the demands of the megamachine.

our megatechnic culture, based as it is on the strange supposition that subjective malice has no reality and that evils do not exist, except in the sense of reparable mechanical defects, has proved itself incompetent to take on such responsibilities.

Con i mezzi di comunicazione di massa su grandi distanze, l'isolamento della popolazione si è rivelato un mezzo di controllo molto efficace.

But instead of freeing labor, the royal mega-machine boasted of imprisoning and enslaving it.

Let us not forget that the same demands for accurate artillery fire resulted in the invention of the modern computer.

Though the moral onus for promoting war has made the munitions manufacturers the scapegoats, the fact is that the paper-profits of war equally enrich every other part of the national economy, even agriculture; for war, with its unparalleled consumption of goods, and its unparalleled wastes, temporarily overcomes the chronic defect of an expanding technology-'over-production.' War, by restoring scarcity, is necessary on classic capitalist terms to ensure profit.

The masters of the underground citadel are committed to a 'war' they cannot bring to an end, with weapons whose ultimate effects they cannot control, for purposes that they cannot accomplish.

The point I am making is that if craftsmanship had not been condemned to death by starvation wages and meager profits, if it had, in fact, been protected and subsidized as so many of the new mechanical industries were in fact extravagantly subsidized, right down to the jet planes and rockets today, our technology as a whole, even that of 'fine technics' would have been immensely richer-and more efficient.

Should we wonder, then, that a world that has been constructed deliberately to accommodate machines and mechanized men has proved increasingly hostile to organic realities and human needs? Without a more organic ideological framework it is hardly remarkable that our one-sided technology has cut man off from his biological potentialities and alienated him from his historic selves, both past and future.

Through the army, in fact, the standard model of the megamachine was transmitted from culture to culture.

The ideal symbolic site indeed for the new pyramids is, as originally at Los Alamos, the desert, for that is the ultimate environment, done over and more perfectly sterilized by the machine process, which corresponds to the ideology itself.

Tolstoi felt that the strange dark room he had awakened in, far from home, was a coffin. As in the womb-dream of childhood, he felt himself floating in an oppressive nothingness. No better image could be found for the state of modern man. That collective coffin is now the envelope of our whole 'civilization': not only materialized but accurately symbolized in underground shelters and military control centers: the technocratic tomb of tombs.

But now the forces challenging the power complex have a special advantage that derives from the advances in technology: its members, however separated in space, are united in time, are united in space through books, discs, taped records, and frequent, quickly arranged face-to-face meetings. Hence resistance to the megamachine is no longer pathetically sporadic, but increasingly coordinated through constant inter-viewing as well as inter-communication.

Something essential to man's creativity, even in science, may disappear when the defiantly metaphoric language of poetry gives way completely to the denatured language of the computer.

The production of the atom bomb was in fact crucial to the building of the new megamachine, little though anyone at the time had that larger objective in mind. For it was the success of this project that gave the scientists a central place in the new power complex and resulted eventually in the invention of many other instruments that have rounded out and universalized the system of control first established to meet only the exigencies of war.

Despite the elimination of subjectivity from the mechanical world picture, the desire for perfection, the need to defy and circumvent fate, the impulse to transcendence, can be observed in technology, too, along with other manifestations common to religion, like the readiness to accept sacrifice and premature death.

But though the parts of language are standardized and in a sense mass-produced, they achieve the maximum of variety, individuality, and autonomy. No technology has yet approached this degree of refinement: the intricate mechanisms of the so-called Nuclear Age are extremely primitive in comparison, for they can utilize and express only a narrow segment of the human personality divorced from its total historic expression.

With this new 'megatechnics' the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man's role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organizations