Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
now it’s computers and more computers / and soon everybody will have one, / three-year-olds will have computers / and everybody will know everything / about everybody else / long before they meet them / and so they won’t want to meet them. / nobody will want to meet anybody / else ever again / and everybody will be / a recluse / like I am now.
Even if you avoid the internet completely . . . you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near impossible to regulate or control.
Everyone knows that the internet is changing our lives, mostly because someone in the media has uttered that exact phrase every single day since 1993.
All of a sudden, we’ve lost a lot of control. We can’t turn off our internet; we can’t turn off our smartphones; we can’t turn off our computers. You used to ask a smart person a question. Now who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it’s not God.
The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension.
Science and technology have become the dominant faith in our society. . . . To question this commitment to technological change, to ask whether we’ve calculated the true cost of our faith in the machine, is to raise the unpleasant thought that some of what we call progress might be little more than an elaborate con job. And people don’t like to admit that they’ve been had.
Now, clearly, this is the day the machines have risen up and are taking over, but don’t panic: they only know our thoughts, feelings, family, friends, location, facial patterns, and banking data.
What do you mean you’ve been spying on me? she thought—hot, blind, unreasoning, on the toilet. What do you mean you’ve been spying on me, with this thing in my hand that is an eye?
It seems to me . . . that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.
The information came to me the way information does now, through the internet, which means less that I somehow consumed it than that it happened to me or that it entered my skin on a pore level or that I breathed it in like a vapor.
The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.
We cannot divorce what we are producing from what we are. We create technology out of the vision we have of ourselves. If we are blind in our conception of ourselves, we will create a blind technology.
I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful. To go for giantism is to go for self-destruction.
The ultimate goal of technology . . . is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes—a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance—with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.
This is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be.
