Ivan Illich, The Rivers North of the Future (c. 1997):
It is possible that in our time fear has changed its quality again. We have gone from a revelation of the unspeakable, un-understandable capacity of industrial man to generate horrors, as foreshadowed in Kafka, and magnificently shaped in the poetry of Paul Celan, to the age of Prozac. And I’m speaking here not only of that one drug but the direction in which it wants to go, with chemistry of a technical, psycho-manipulative kind. We’re now living in an age in which it might be fruitful to envisage new types of darkness.
-
Paul Virilio, Crepuscular Dawn (2002):
Each time we invent a new technology, whether electronic or biogenetic, we program a new catastrophe and an accident that we cannot imagine. When we invented electricity, we didn’t imagine Chernobyl.
-
Oliver Sacks, ‘The Machine Stops’ (c. 2015):
These threats, of course, concern me, but at a distance—I worry more about the subtle, pervasive draining out of meaning, of intimate contact, from our society and our culture. When I was eighteen, I read Hume for the first time, and I was horrified by the vision he expressed in his eighteenth-century work “A Treatise of Human Nature,” in which he wrote that mankind is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” As a neurologist, I have seen many patients rendered amnesic by destruction of the memory systems in their brains, and I cannot help feeling that these people, having lost any sense of a past or a future and being caught in a flutter of ephemeral, ever-changing sensations, have in some way been reduced from human beings to Humean ones.
I have only to venture into the streets of my own neighborhood, the West Village, to see such Humean casualties by the thousand: younger people, for the most part, who have grown up in our social-media era, have no personal memory of how things were before, and no immunity to the seductions of digital life. What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.
-
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985):
Anyone who is even slightly familiar with the history of communications knows that every new technology for thinking involves a trade-off. It giveth and taketh away, although not quite in equal measure. Media change does not necessarily result in equilibrium. It sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it is the other way around.
-
Thomas Pynchon, ‘Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?’ (1984):
The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening - it became part of daily life. They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired. It took no German philosopher, then or later, to point out what this did, had been doing, to wages and jobs. Public feeling about the machines could never have been simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery - especially when it's been around for a while - not to mention serious resentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening. One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work - to be “worth” that many human souls.
-
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950):
The great weakness of the machine - the weakness that saves us so far from being dominated by it - is that it cannot yet take into account the vast range of probability that characterizes the human situation. The dominance of the machine presupposes a society in the last stages of increasing entropy, where probability is negligible and where the statistical differences among individuals are nil.