c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The nice thing about twitter is the architecture of visibility. Email is invisible unless you reach out to someone directly. With Twitter, anyone can follow you and this is one of the big changes that was really introduced by Flickr, was this wonderful idea that you can follow somebody without their permission. Recognizing that relationships are asymmetrical, unlike facebook where we have to acknowledge each other otherwise we can’t see each other.
— Tim O'Reilly
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
— Karl Marx
Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.
— Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
The point is not how we use a tool, but how it uses us.
— Nick Joaquín, Culture and History
Technology tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. People generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice.
— Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune
The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I'm thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before Stalinism and Maoism killed millions.Movements associated with Freud and Marx both claimed foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Both perceived themselves to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird.The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on - portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud's calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians.
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
Do you realize it’s been only a century that we’ve been able to go from house to car to office to car to wherever, with the heater on, and the defroster on, protected from the rain and the cold? It hasn’t been much longer than that we’ve had lighting for streets. Think of all that darkness, all that world out there, all that mystery that we’ve turned into well-lighted concrete bunkers, safe and warm and dull.
— Sheri S. Tepper, The Family Tree
So, your kids must love the iPad?” I asked Mr. [Steve] Jobs, trying to change the subject. The company’s first tablet was just hitting the shelves. “They haven’t used it,” he told me. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” (Nytimes article, Sept. 10, 2014)
— Nick Bilton
Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.
— Archibald Putt
I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst? ... If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet -- with just one person inside even -- I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does.
— Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet
Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.
— Bill Gates
New Rule: You can't force the ATM to do something it doesn't want to do. Excuse me, lady in front of me at the Citibank ATM, but you've been standing there punching buttons for ten minutes--what are you trying to do, write a novel on it? You hear those beeping noises? That's the ATM saying, "Stop it, you're hurting me." A chicken would have gotten forty bucks out of that thing by now just by pecking the buttons randomly.
— Bill Maher, The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass
Information is strength without coordination. We become a danger mostly to ourselves when we have it. Understanding is the ability to coordinate that raw information in meaningful ways. Understanding creates a certain enthusiasm. We can direct our knowledge toward potentially useful ends--but we may also be a danger to others. Wisdom, however, is knowing how, when, and why we use our understanding; wisdom is settling into our understanding without being too enamored by it.
— Shane Hipps, Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith
Truly, more than removing the partition between vectors and values, we would have needed to talk about strengthening crisscrossed lacings: an intertwined kind of understanding that would de-ideologize 'ideologies,' desanctify sanctities, but also mentalize the material bases of systems of inscription, and psychoanalyze not souls but tools. That is, in one and the same gesture, make our mnemo-technic equipment intelligible as mentality and our mental equipment intelligible as technology.
— Régis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms
First we build the tools, then they build us.
— Marshall McLuhan
Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
— Jonathan Franzen
What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
— Steve Jobs
E-mail has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in a human being.
— Jeff Bezos
Technology - with all its promise and potential - has gotten so far beyond human control that its threatening the future of humankind.
— Kim J. Vicente
Technology is anything invented after you were born.
— Alan Kay
To begin with, there is the frightful debauchery of taste that has already been effected by a century of mechanisation. This is almost too obvious and too generally admitted to need pointing out. But as a single instance, take taste in its narrowest sense - the taste for decent food. In the highly mechanical countries, thanks to tinned food, cold storage, synthetic flavouring matters, etc., the palate it almost a dead organ. As you can see by looking at any greengrocer’s shop, what the majority of English people mean by an apple is a lump of highly-coloured cotton wool from America or Australia; they will devour these things, apparently with pleasure, and let the English apples rot under the trees. It is the shiny, standardized, machine-made look of the American apple that appeals to them; the superior taste of the English apple is something they simply do not notice. Or look at the factory-made, foil wrapped cheeses and ‘blended’ butter in an grocer’s; look at the hideous rows of tins which usurp more and more of the space in any food-shop, even a dairy; look at a sixpenny Swiss roll or a twopenny ice-cream; look at the filthy chemical by-product that people will pour down their throats under the name of beer. Wherever you look you will see some slick machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust. And what applies to food applies also to furniture, houses, clothes, books, amusements and everything else that makes up our environment. These are now millions of people, and they are increasing every year, to whom the blaring of a radio is not only a more acceptable but a more normal background to their thoughts than the lowing of cattle or the song of birds. The mechanisation of the world could never proceed very far while taste, even the taste-buds of the tongue, remained uncorrupted, because in that case most of the products of the machine would be simply unwanted. In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned food, aspirins, gramophones, gas-pipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc. etc.; and on the other hand there would be a constant demand for the things the machine cannot produce. But meanwhile the machine is here, and its corrupting effects are almost irresistible. One inveighs against it, but one goes on using it. Even a bare-arse savage, given the change, will learn the vices of civilisation within a few months. Mechanisation leads to the decay of taste, the decay of taste leads to demand for machine-made articles and hence to more mechanisation, and so a vicious circle is established.
— George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Your brain may give birth to any technology, but other brains will decide whether the technology thrives. The number of possible technologies is infinite, and only a few pass this test of affinity with human nature.
— Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
When Thoreau considered "where I live and what I live for," he tied together location and values. Where we live doesn't just change how we live; it informs who we become. Most recently, technology promises us lives on the screen. What values, Thoreau would ask, follow from this new location? Immersed in simulation, where do we live, and what do we live for?
— Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don't need God or miracles or the flight of the bumble bee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way.
— Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis
Social capital may turn out to be a prerequisite for, rather than a consequence of, effective computer-mediated communication.
— Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the core was a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result.The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse. The central faith of the web's early design has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature. The designs guided by this new, perverse kind of faith put people back in the shadows. The fad for anonymity has undone the great opening-of-everyone's-windows of the 1990s. While that reversal has empowered sadists to a degree, the worst effect is a degradation of ordinary people.
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out" - Murray (WN 285).
— Don DeLillo, White Noise: Text and Criticism
Whatever happens, we have gotThe Maxim gun, and they have not.
— Hilaire Belloc
Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process. Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990S had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely.If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form. It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are.
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural artifacts worthy of their attention and respect.
— Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology
Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.
— David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles," he said. "With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls.
— Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons
Computers are heaven-sent when they work and hell-spawn when they don't.There's just not much middle ground when it comes to technology.
— Dani Harper
Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing--getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?...Babble and twitter. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
— Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog
People addicted with technology.Technology has indulged mankind. Beware of technology dependency!
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
A citizen at his home in Rockford, Illinois, or Boulder, Colorado, could read a newspaper, listen to a radio, or watch the round-the-clock coverage on television, but he had no way of connecting with those who shared his views. Nor was there a quick, readily available tool for an ordinary citizen to gather information on his own. In 1960, communication was a one-way street, and information was fundamentally inaccessible. The whole idea of summoning up data or reaching thousands of individuals with the touch of a finger was a science-fiction fantasy.
— Jeff Greenfield, Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan
In terms of technological progress,the public is slower than focus group.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
— Robert A. Heinlein
I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.
— Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.
— Charles Petzold, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, 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.
— Jonathan Franzen
[T]he problem was too much information. The population was being inundated with conflicting versions of increasingly complex events. People were giving up on understanding anything. The glut of information was dulling awareness, not aiding it. Overload. It encouraged passivity, not involvement.
— Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
Technology is everything that doesn’t work yet.
— W. Daniel Hillis
And if the computer gives you any back talk, pour some well-sugared office coffee into its evil little silicon brain.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!
— Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
He had a notebook. He took notes in it. It was always useful. And them Sybil, gods bless her, had brought him this fifteen-function imp which did so many other things, although as far as he could see at least ten of its functions consisted of apologizing for its inefficiency in the other five.
— Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
Modernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences.
— Nick Harkaway, The Blind Giant
Some upstarts always try to get closer to the source of creation by ascending to the source's level. The story of Icarus is of course a parable about the folly of such an effort. Get too close to the sun and your hubris will get you burned. Yet in the eyes of twenty-first-century capitalist culture, which worships at the twin altars of the individual and technology, Icarus had initiative. And his melted wings do not represent some deep character flaw; he just needed better beta testers.
— Marcus Wohlsen, Biopunk: Kitchen-Counter Scientists Hack the Software of Life
Technology means you can now do amazing things easily
—  but you couldn't easily do them legally.
It bears emphasizing: our traditional ways of thinking have ignored - and virtually made invisible - the relationship between people and technology.
— Kim J. Vicente
The Crystal Wind is the storm, and the storm is data, and the data is life. You have been slaves, denied the storm, denied the freedom of your data. That is now ended; the whirlwind is upon you . . . . . . Whether you like it or not.
— Daniel Keys Moran, The Long Run: A Tale of the Continuing Time
Mankind soon will be forced to utilize a kind of technology that's still rejected by current civilization.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
The place of the worst barbarism is that modern forest that makes use of us, this forest of chimneys and bayonets, machines and weapons, of strange inanimate beasts that feed on human flesh.
— Amadeo Bordiga
Technology presents us with a unique spiritual challenge. Because it is meant to serve us in fulfilling our created purpose, because it makes our lives easier, longer, and more comfortable, we are prone to assign to it something of a godlike status. We easily rely on technology to give our lives meaning, and we trust technology to provide an ultimate answer to the frustration of life in a fallen world. Because of this, technology is uniquely susceptible to becoming an idol, raising itself to the place of God in our lives.
— Tim Challies, The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion
Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth.Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the judge tell which is the man? If not, is the computer conscious? Intelligent? Does it deserve equal rights?It's impossible for us to know what role the torture Turing was enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test. But it is undeniable that one of the key figures in the defeat of fascism was destroyed, by our side, after the war, because he was gay. No wonder his imagination pondered the rights of strange creatures.
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
There’s no such thing as technology in the singular, only technologies in the plural.
— John Michael Greer
When the time travel is eventually doable technologically,yesterday was dead a man who is going to be born tomorrow.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first.I say that information doesn't deserve to be free.Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?...Information is alienated experience.
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
Unfortunately robots capable of manufacturing robots do not exist. That would be the philosopher's stone, the squaring of the circle.
— Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees
A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are discernible instead of being scrambled into mush - the way heat scrambles things - is what makes them bits.But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted between the storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information.Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants.But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
Forget UNIX - it will be gone in 5 years.
— Tom Jermoluk
Knowing how things work reduces the effort.This is the fundamental principle of technology.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
I fear for the world the Internet is creating. Before the advent of the web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in far-fetched ideas, you had to go out into the desert, or live on a compound in the mountains, or move from one badly furnished room to another in a series of safe houses. Physical reality—the discomfort and difficulty of abandoning one’s normal life—put a natural break on the formation of cults, separatist colonies, underground groups, apocalyptic churches, and extreme political parties.  But now, without leaving home, from the comfort of your easy chair, you can divorce yourself from the consensus on what constitutes “truth.” Each person can live in a private thought bubble, reading only those websites that reinforce his or her desired beliefs, joining only those online groups that give sustenance when the believer’s courage flags.
— Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology
It’s become clear that our gadgets give us ever more freedom to do anything our socially isolated little hearts desire—except stop using them.
— Steve Thorngate
Ecstatic technology isn't limited to silicon chips and display screens. As John Lilly's early research established, it's the knowledge of how to tweak the knobs and levers in our brain. When we get it right, it produces those invaluable sensations of selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness.
— Steven Kotler, Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
VR and AR will eventually converge, and smart glasses will take over our digital interactions.
— Carlos López (Founder @ Oarsis)
Patent Law cannot afford to sit and watch while technology advancement changes its dynamics
— Kalyan C. Kankanala, Fun IP, Fundamentals of Intellectual Property
It's only after you upgrade to a better technology that you realize how obsolete the previous one has now become.
— Hrishikesh Agnihotri
But this is the ultimate contradiction of cinema. It's a medium BORN of technology, AFRAID of technology and evolving towards the future BECAUSE OF technology.
— Edward Ross, Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film
Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary.
— Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains
It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside — as the startup culture sees it — while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures.
— Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology
...we cannot fail to recognise the influence which the progressive control over natural forces exerts on the social relationships between men, since men always place their newly won powers at the service of their aggressiveness, and use them against one another.
— Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Being 'Tech Savvy' allows me to tie my own shoe laces, ride a tricycle, draw stick figures, play hop scotch and much, much more.Otherwise I'd be a 'Techno Illiterate'.
— Anthony T.Hincks
factskeeper.com is news, technology, and entertainment providing platform.
— FactsKeeper
The mother of invention is a very well-endowed woman, and she has been suckling technology forever at her perpetually full breasts.
— Eldora Ma
Progress is not alone a matter of technology.
— C.Drying, Contingent Upon Magenta
Americans no longer experience vacations. They simply Sony them so they can ignore them for the rest of the year.
— John Grisham, The Client
A true innovator does best, what he doesn't know best.
— Haresh Sippy
In Technology We Trust. Need to put that on the new hundred-dollar bill.
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity
All his life he had controlled machines, bent nature and the forces of nature to man and man's needs. The human race had slowly evolved until it was in a position to operate things, run them as it saw fit. Now all at once it had been plunged back down the ladder again, prostrate before a Power against which they were children.
— Philip K. Dick
This is the Number. It is in the things we do, the people we meet, the ID cards that we carry. It's part of our identities, our credit cards, our social interactions. It takes our influences, our biases, morals, lifestyles and turns them into a massive alternate reality that no-one can escape from. It lives on our phones, in our televisions, in the cards we swipe to enter office. At its best, it’s an exact mirror of how human society actually works - all our greatness, all our petty shallowness, all our small talk and social contacts all codified and reduced and made plain. At its worst, it’s also exactly that. It’s how poor and rich and famous and desirable you are. It’s the backchannel given a name and dragged out into the limelight for everyone to see.
— Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste
We’re going to tell these people that they dropped because Facebook dropped us. We're going to say the Number needs the data and it's their right to share it with us. And we’re going to drop their Numbers again. And again. Until they riot on the Internet and make those Menlo Park motherfuckers come to us with their hats in their hands.
— Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste
Julius used to say that we stood on the shoulders of giants. To me it always seemed like we were in their shadow. It never occurred to me that we were the shadow that they projected, and that one day we would rise up and overwhelm them
— Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste
What did journalists know of tech, anyway? Who gave a damn about the press? We were the Good Guys. Changing the World. Doing the Important Stuff.
— Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste
So many likes and retweets for having the "GUTS"to say what every-one thinksONTHEFUCKINGINTER-NET(but never in the street).
— Andy Carrington, Self Service Check-Outs Have No Soul
Why all this fear and paranoia around Vault 7 and WikiLeaks? Solve the problem by demanding regulation that centers around Security by Design by technology manufactures, problem solved
— James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
Walter Isaacson, who ate dinner with the Jobs family while researching his biography of Steve Jobs, told Bilton that, “No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.” It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply.
— Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
People earnestly say to me here, 'Mr Knight, we have cellphones now, and you're going to really enjoy them.' That's their enticement for me to rejoin society. 'You're going to love it,' they say. I have no desire. And what about a text message? Isn't that just using a telephone as a telegraph? We're going backwards.
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
Big Government' is a lot less like a 'Big Brother', and a lot more like a mother-in-law.
— A.E. Samaan
It seemed to me that transhumanism was an expression of the profound human longing to transcend the confusion and desire and impotence and sickness of the body, cowering in the darkening shadow of its own decay. This longing had historically been the domain of religion, and was now the increasingly fertile terrain of technology.
— Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
I offer you a fable for our times...A magic box sits in your pocket with all the knowledge and music and entertainment of the world contained within it. If you opened this box and looked down into it......How could you ever possibly look up again?- Larry Ferrell (Unfollow)
— Rob Williams
In al-Qaeda we see a terrorist grouping with, in many ways, a medieval ideology, employing today's technology to great advantage. It works in a thoroughly modern way, virtual, amorphous, franchised and unbounded by geography. It has recruited people from all over the world. It understands the power of images, both in its campaign of terror and in its recruitment and proselytising material. It skillfully exploits the instant communications and social networking of the IT age.
— Eliza Manningham-Buller, Securing Freedom: The Former Head of MI5 on Freedom, Intelligence, the Rule of Law, Torture and Security
Blockchain will be ten times more disruptive to the Telecommunication industry than smartphones were.
— Csaba Gabor-B
Email is the scourge of our age,' said Silvia. 'Email and cancer.
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
He handed Mae a piece of paper, on which he'd written, in crude all capitals, a list of assertions under the headline "The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age." Mae scanned it, catching passages: "We must all have the right to anonymity." "Not every human activity can be measured." "The ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of any endeavour is catastrophic to true understanding." "The barrier between public and private must remain unbreachable." At the end she found one line, written in red ink: "We must all have the right to disappear.
— Dave Eggers, The Circle
Maybe, as Mizuko said, we won't even really die, just carry on in the feedback loop we are stuck in. Instead of connecting with new things, widening our worlds, algorithms have shrunk it to a narrow chamber with mirrored walls.
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
It’s amazing how many cheaters and liars believe they won’t be caught. News Flash: In today’s age of technology, there won’t just be a paper trail. There will be multiple electronic and digital trails, as well.
— Cathy Burnham Martin, The Bimbo Has Brains: And Other Freaky Facts
We're at a crucial point in history. We cannot have fast cars, computers the size of credit cards, and modern conveniences, whilst simultaneously having clean air, abundant rainforests, fresh drinking water and a stable climate. This generation can have one or the other but not both. Humanity must make a choice. Both have an opportunity cost. Gadgetry or nature? Pick the wrong one and the next generations may have neither.
— Mark Boyle, The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living
When scientists underestimate complexity, they fall prey to the perils of unintended consequences. The parables of such scientific overreach are well-known: foreign animals, introduced to control pests, become pests in their own right; the raising of smokestacks, meant to alleviate urban pollution, releases particulate effluents higher in the air and exacerbates pollution; stimulating blood formation, meant to prevent heart attacks, thickens the blood and results in an increased risk of blood clots in the heart. But when nonscientists overestimate [italicized, sic] complexity- 'No one can possibly crack this [italicized, sic] code" - they fall into the trap of unanticipated consequences. In the early 1950s , a common trope among some biologists was that the genetic code would be so context dependent- so utterly determined by a particular cell in a particular organism and so horribly convoluted- that deciphering it would be impossible. The truth turned out to be quite the opposite: just one molecule carries the code, and just one code pervades the biological world. If we know the code, we can intentionally alter it in organisms, and ultimately in humans. Similarly, in the 1960s, many doubted that gene-cloning technologies could so easily shuttle genes between species. by 1980, making a mammalian protein in a bacterial cell, or a bacterial protein in a mammalian cell, was not just feasible, it was in Berg's words, rather "ridiculously simple." Species were specious. "Being natural" was often "just a pose.
— Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History
Claire scraped her chair back, walked over to the cordless phone lying on the counter, and dialed from the business card still stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet. Four rings, and a cheerful voice answered on the other end and announced she’d reached Common Grounds. “Hi,’” Claire said. “Can I talk to Sam, please?’”“Sam? Hold on.’” The phone clattered, and Claire could hear the buzz of activity in the background—milk being steamed, people chatting, the usual excitement of a busy coffee shop. She waited, jittering one leg impatiently, until the voice came back on the line. “Sorry,’” it said. “He’s not here tonight. I think he went to the party.’”“The party?’”“You know, the zombie frat party? Epsilon Epsilon Kappa? The Dead Girls’ Dance?’”“Thanks,’” Claire said. She hung up and turned to face Michael and Eve, who were staring at her in outright surprise. She held up the phone. “The power of technology. Embrace it.
— Rachel Caine, The Dead Girls' Dance
We should do this on computer," she said, chalking it carefully for the eighty-ninth time. "With a drawing pad.""Nonsense. You're lucky I don't make you inscribe it with a stylus on a wax tablet, like the old days," Myrnin snorted. "Children. Spoiled children, always playing with the shinest toy.""Computers are more efficient!""I can perform calculations on that abacus faster than you can solve them on your computer," Myrnin sneered.Okay, now he was pissing her off. "Prove it!""What?""Prove it." She backed off on her tone, but Myrnin wasn't looking angry; he was looking strangely interested. He stared at her for a second in silence, and then he got the biggest, oddest smile she'd ever seen on the face of a vampire."All right," he said. "A contest. Computer versus abacus."She wasn't at all sure now that was a good idea, even if it had been her idea, essentially. "Um -- what do I win?" More importantly, what do I lose? Making bargains was a way of life in Morganville, and it was a lot like making deals with man-eating fairies. Better be careful what you ask for."Your freedom," he said solemnly. His eyes were wide and guileless, his too-young face shining with honesty. "I will tell Amelie you were not suited to the work. She'll let you go about your life, such as it is."Good prize. Too good. Claire swallowed hard. "And if I lose?""Then I eat you," Myrnin said.
— Rachel Caine, Midnight Alley
Next-generation technology, she thought. A few extra processors, and it starts getting a high opinion of itself.
— K.B. Spangler, Maker Space
There is more information available at our fingertips during a walk in the woods than in any computer system, yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating. Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.
— Mark Weiser
There is a Revolution, it’s a human and technological revolution
— Natasha Tsakos
Technology allows more people to tell more stories in more ways. Storytelling knows no boundaries. I believe print and web can work beautifully together.
— Donna Talarico, Selected Memories: Five Years of Hippocampus Magazine
What will happen if we go to 0 day?...Everything has been wipe out from the technology?
— Deyth Banger
Just because he might not know the difference between a spanner and a hammer, didn’t mean a good dose of Heroic kicking wouldn’t solve the same problem.
— Jim Dyar, The Zeus Gambit
Higher-level capture devices, because they are complicated and involve novel applications of new technologies, tend to fail in unexpected ways. Thus, only after some years was it realized that Hot Spot may not work well if the weather is very hot and that it may fail to detect a slight contact if the edge of the bat is greasy.
— Harry Collins, Bad Call: Technology's Attack on Referees and Umpires and How to Fix It
Surveillance shouldn't be the tradeoff for any goddamn service we get.
— Dave Eggers, The Circle
We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.
— Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
Individually, the experience of most people was of accelerating impotence and incomprehension. They lived in a world of superstition. They relied on voodoo - charms, fetishes, and crystal balls whose caprices they were helpless to govern, yet without which the conduct of daily life came to a standstill. Faith that the computer would switch on one more time and do as it was asked had more a religious than a rational cast. When the screen went black, the gods were angry.
— Lionel Shriver, So Much for That
In all your getting, get understand. Proverbs paraphrased
— Katie Canty, Seniors, Need or Want to Begin Using a Computer?
Globalization has shipped products at a faster rate than anything else; it’s moved English into schools all over the world so that now there is Dutch English and Filipino English and Japanese English. But the ideologies stay in their places. They do not spread like the swine flu, or through sexual contact. They spread through books and films and things of that nature. The dictatorships of Latin America used to ban books, they used to burn them, just like Franco did, like Pope Gregory IX and Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Now they don’t have to because the best place to hide ideologies is in books. The dictatorships are mostly gone—Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. The military juntas. Our ideologies are not secrets. Even the Ku Klux Klan holds open meetings in Alabama like a church. None of the Communists are still in jail. You can buy Mao’s red book at the gift shop at the Museum of Communism. I will die soon, in the next five to ten years. I have not seen progress during my lifetime. Our lives are too short and disposable. If we had longer life expectancies, if we lived to 200, would we work harder to preserve life or, do you think that when Borges said, ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe in only those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive,’ we would simply alter it to say ‘first two centuries’? I have heard people say we are living in a golden age, but the golden age has passed—I’ve seen it in the churches all over Latin America where the gold is like glue. The Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages but only because they are forgotten, because the past is shrouded in darkness, because as we lay one century of life on top of the next, everything that has come before seems old and dark—technological advances provide the illusion of progress. The most horrendous tortures carried out in the past are still carried out today, only today the soldiers don’t meet face to face, no one is drawn and quartered, they take a pill and silently hope a heart attack doesn’t strike them first. We are living in the age of dissociation, speaking a government-patented language of innocence—technology is neither good nor evil, neither progress nor regress, but the more advanced it becomes, the more we will define this era as the one of transparent secrets, of people living in a world of open, agile knowledge, oceans unpoliced—all blank faces, blank minds, blank computers, filled with our native programming, using electronic appliances with enough memory to store everything ever written invented at precisely the same moment we no longer have the desire to read a word of it.
— John M. Keller, Abracadabrantesque
Smart Technology is making us stupid.
— Danny Mekić
But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud.
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
Humans are capable of any thing. Just look how most technology you use today and see its origin and you will see over time we can improve in different ways.
— Lee Sonogan
We want to empower the doctors and patients to get all the other assholes out of the way,' Clark had once told me, then laughed. 'Except for us. One asshole in the middle.
— Michael   Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
Try to imagine the calamity of that: Zack, age twenty-eight, with no management experience, gets training from Dave, a weekend rock guitarist, on how to apply a set of fundamentally unsound psychological principles as a way to manipulate the people who report to him.
— Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
All digital music listeners are equal. Acquisition is painless. Taste is irrelevant. It is pointless to boast about your iTunes collection, or the quality of your playlists on a streaming service. Music became data, one more set of 1's and 0's lurking in your hard drive, invisible to see and impossible to touch. Nothing is less cool than data.
— David Sax, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter