Quotes About Technology

Microserfs (1995) p28 'He's thinking of quitting [Microsoft] to be a pixelation broker, going around to museums to digitize their paintings

Ethan and I drove around Silicon Valley today looking at various company parking lots to see whose workers are working on a Sunday. He says that's the surest way to tell which company to invest in. If the techies aren't grinding, the stock ain't climbing.

Wow. Whoops. Sorry. ... I just lost two hours inside a YouTube kitten warp.

Probably tastes like a pocket calculator garnished with dried herpes juice flakes.

I am by now completely convinced that my downfall in life is going to be my inability to achieve computer nirvana like a true hacker or hackette. I think this lacking is the most unmodern facet of my personality—the career equivalent of having six fingers, or a vestigial tail.

I've always been interested in the unintended side effects of technology. For instance, when the car was invented, who would have thought dogs would like sticking their heads out the window to enjoy the scentscape generated by speed and wind?

Claire put scientifically enhanced popcorn in the microwave oven. I never feel like I'm putting food in one of these things, she then says, entering with beeps, the time-set into the LED. It feels more like I'm inserting fuel rods into a core.

Once you've used your brain flat-out, you can't go into the SLOW mode. You can't drive an Infinite J-3B and then get downgraded to an Daewoo. Brains don't workd that way.

I sometimes wonder about people who wake up and spend almost their whole day online. When they go to bed at night, they'll have almost no organic memories of their own. If they do this for a long time, you can begin to say that their intelligence is, in a true sense, artificial.

The whole Silicon Valley is oxymoronic—geeky and rich and hip.

This document was created in Microsoft Word, which in the year 2014 is pathetic.

These were citizens who, never having bothered to awaken to the technological and psychic changes in their world, hadn't bothered to defend themselves, hadn't bothered to build walls or plan or counterattacks or build weapons-- asleep inside their collective dream, thinking for all the world that the unthinkable would never happen. Thinking they were safe.

Anyway, it's a good thing we're human. We design business spreadsheets, paint programs, and word processing equipment. So that tells you where we're at as a species. What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?

Speaking of the information superhighway, we have all given each other official permission to administer a beating to whoever uses that accursed term. We're so sick of it!

Nostalgia for the 20th century brain helps nobody.

I am now [email protected]. @ could become the Mc or Mac of the next millennium.

When I started researching this book, I thought that the Internet was a metaphor for life; now I think life is a metaphor for the Internet. I'm not trying to be cute. Just as it is impossible to point to a single spark within the human brain that proves life, so it is impossible to disprove that the Internet is a living thing. It is massive. It never sleeps. And more and more, it's talking about us behind our backs.

This guy here on the screen— Coupland turned up his laptop to show me the JPEG of the Chinese guy in Tiananmen Square. Know what he's doing now? He's working out this co-sponsor deal with Verizon Wireless and Pizza Hut.

We lost handwriting and got Comic Sans in return. That's a very bad deal.

Humanity actually seems to be split down the middle on the definition of luxury: those who want gilded leopard-shaped teapots and those who want to live in the white box their iPhone came in.

The twentieth century showed us the evil face of physics. This century will show us the evil face of biology.

People sometimes note the transient, ever-changing nature of the Web, but in fact the opposite is true. The Web is a gigantic tar pit that traps and fossilizes every electron that ventures within.

classic example of what we programmers call emergent behavior.

artificial intelligence.