The discussion of the whole problem of technology ... has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upo...n the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful.... But ... homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and equipment in order to erect a world, not ... to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.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 »
You know, if this is Venus, or some other strange planet, we're liable to run into some high-domed characters with green blood in ...their veins who'll blast at us with their atomic death rayguns, and there we'll be with these--these poor old-fashioned shootin' irons.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We go on multiplying our conveniences only to multiply our cares. We increase our possessions only to the enlargement of our anxie...ties.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we ho...pe to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"If Steam has done nothing else, it has at least added a whole new Species to English Literature ... the booklets--the little thri...lling romances, where the Murder comes at page fifteen, and the Wedding at page forty--surely they are due to Steam?" "And when we travel by electricity--if I may venture to develop your theory--we shall have leaflets instead of booklets, and the Murder and the Wedding will come on the same page."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »