Quotes About Technology

Oh, and maybe I should say what my name is. Just for the record. It's Rafe. Rafe Daquin. I'm Rafe Daquin, and I'm a brain in a box. Hi.

What did you all name your BrainPals? Asshole, I said. Bitch, Jesse said. Dickward, said Thomas. Fuckhead, said Harry. Satan, said Maggie. Sweetie, said Susan. Apparantly, I'm the only one who likes my BrainPal.

One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour. VIRGINIA WOOLF, THE WAVES

Institutional leaders will need to seek out "reverse mentors" among (often younger) individuals who can help them understand and master edge practices.

Some automatic responses are good — they're skills, and we need them for life and labor. But the tendency to accumulate programming tends to have a life of its own — or more accurately, to steal the life that belongs to us.

from the end of John Shirley's Black Glass, something like: the Singularity guys don't understand, they aren't copying us, our brains, just the noise we make

We can shoot rockets into space but we can't cure anger or discontent.

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears that the solar system of stars.

When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.

Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.

And now submarines are armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder.

Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process.

When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking.

Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process [...] Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech [...] What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless

The little engine roared and then stopped. Adam sat back for a moment, limp but proud, before he got out. The postmaster looked out between the bars of his golden grill. I see you've got one of the damn things, he said. Have to keep up with the times, said Adam. I predict there'll come a time when you can't find a horse, Mr. Trask. Maybe so. They'll change the face of the countryside. They get their clatter into everything, the postmaster went on.

Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris

Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars

But this tractor does two things—it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank.

Stone and wood had been the coin of the building realm until the arrival of cast iron in the middle of the nineteenth century. Until then the weight of buildings had been borne by their walls, but in 1848 James Bogardus used a skeleton of cast-iron posts and beams to support a building from within. Since the walls no longer bore the load, they could be freed from their former obligations.

Elisha Graves Otis had demonstrated an elevator at the Crystal Palace in 1853 that had a safety device that prevented it from falling if the cable broke.3 In the cast-iron Haughwout Building on Broadway at Broome Street, where china and cutlery were sold, Otis installed the first of his passenger safety-elevators

Television was soon to eclipse print's inky cloud with its magnetic flare of electrons, pulling millions from their reading chairs to the viewing couch.

The six o'clock news is all about space, all about emptiness: some bald men plays with little toys to show the docking and undocking maneuvers, and then a panel talks about the significance of this for the next five hundred years. They keep mentioning Columbus but as far as Rabbit can see it's the exact opposite: Columbus flew blind and hit something, these guys see exactly where they're aiming and it's a big round nothing.

I focused the power from my armor into my leg and kicked the door in. The metal and plastic fibers splintered and the hinges ripped free from the wall. "By the way, boss," HARV said. "I believe that the door was unlocked.