The Technium

Found Quotes, 9


Twitter makes me like people I’ve never met and Facebook makes me hate people I know in real life.–Shayla Maddox, Twitter, Oct 19, 2010

The internet, at this time in history, is the greatest client assignment of all time. The Western world is porting itself over to the web in mind and deed and is looking to make itself comfortable and productive. It’s every person in the world, connected to every other person in the world, and no one fully understands how to make best use of this new reality because no one has seen anything like it before. The internet wants to hire you to build stuff for it because its trying to figure out what it can do. It’s offering you a blank check and asking you to come up with something fascinating and useful that it can embrace en masse, to the benefit of everyone.” – Ben Pieratt, Varsity Bookmarking, July 12, 2011

Don’t say yes. Be yes. — Anne Herbert, Peace and Love and Noticing the Details, July 9, 2011

The hope that we can cure the ills of industrialism by the homeopathy of more technology seems at last to be losing status. — Wendell Berry, Faustian Economics, Harpers, May 2008.

The reason I took my baby with me on business class is that airlines have a crazy rule that instead of paying for another seat, you can put a kid under 2 on your lap for an entire domestic flight. They won’t let you keep your purse on your lap during takeoff and landing, since it might turn into a deadly projectile, but an infant is apparently soft enough to ricochet harmlessly off passenger after passenger. — Joel Stein, Time, Baby on Board, July 18, 2011

I see no possibility of a worldwide Luddite rebellion that will smash all machinery to bits, so we might as well sit back and see what is happening and what will happen to us in a cybernetic world. Resenting a new technology will not halt its progress… Man’s relationship with his machinery is thus inherently symbiotic. This has always been the case; it’s only in the electric age that man has an opportunity to recognize this marriage to his own technology… I’m “predicting” what has already happened and merely extrapolating a current process to its logical conclusion. — Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Interview, 1969

Most of this book is Used Information… You can look at that news two ways. If you operate by the Bread Model of Information, it’s terrible news. You’ve been gypped – stale information. On the other hand if you view information as something fundamentally different from bread, there’s the possibility of good news. Having lived longer, the information here may be wiser, more co-evolved with the world. It may be more refined, having cycled complexly through the minds and responses of 40,000 CQ readers. And it’s been through two editorial distillations; the less-than-wonderful and out-of-date may have been extracted. — Stewart Brand, introduction to Space Colonies, 1977

Duty calls
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