In Europe, you do philosophy by performing discourse on another guy's text, and so Derrida will go over Heidegger, and Habermas wi...ll extend Marx's corpus; but in America you could never get away with kinky stuff like that, for you have to generate philosophy from real things--like computers or television. You need to look at Omni magazine to get a feel for this new kind of mail-order, Popular Mechanics science of mind. It's full of articles about meditation helmets and downloading the soul into computers so that when your body wears out you can live forever. What is completely missing in Europe is precisely what you will find in America: namely, an electronic Umwelt in which history is replaced with movies, education is replaced with entertainment, and nature is replaced with technology. This peculiar wedding of low kitsch and high tech generates a posthistoric world that no European literary intellectual can quite fathom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination. Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meani...ngs in symbolic terms, and the reordering of nature--the qualities of space and time--in new perceptual and material form. Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic. Technology is the instrumental ordering of human experience within a logic of efficient means, and the direction of nature to use its powers for material gain. But art and technology are not separate realms walled off from each other. Art employs techne, but for its own ends. Techne, too, is a form of art that bridges culture and social structure, and in the process reshapes both.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To de-animalize human mentality, to purge it of obsolete evolutionary characteristics, in particular of death,... which foreknowledge terrorizes the contents of skulls with, is the fundamental project of technology;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fa...ll but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced.... Tropical beaches turned into high-priced slums where thousand-room hotels elbowed each other for glimpses of once-famous surf not because those who loved the beaches wanted them there but because enormous jets could bring a million tourists every year--and therefore did.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I hate him for he is a Christian; But more, for that in low simplicity... He lends out money gratis, and brings down The rate of usance here with us in Venice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A central theme in the speculative writing on technology of the past century is that forms of technics, like forms of biological l...ife, undergo a process of evolution. With the passage of time, newer and more sophisticated varieties of apparatus, organization, and technique rise to replace older, simpler varieties. New technologies enter into areas of social existence where they had not been previously. Just as Darwin observes that the various species of life on the Galapagos Islands tend to specialize and diversify into particular biological niches, so it is that forms of technology continually spread into fresh areas of social utility. In both number and diversity the kinds of technical artifice available to human societies increase.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, "I ha...ve no pleasure in them"; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return with the rain; in the day when the guards of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the women who grind cease working because they are few, and those who look through the windows see dimly; when the doors on the street are shut, and the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low; when one is afraid of heights, and terrors are in the road; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along and desire fails; because all must go to their eternal home, and the mourners will go about the streets; before the silver cord is snapped, and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the breath returns to God who gave it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »