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| LOOM OF TECHNOLOGY |
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The Loom of Technology/The Technology of the Loom
"It was then that I began to look into the seams of your doctrine. I wanted only to pick at a single knot; but when I had got that undone, the whole thing raveled out. And then I understood that it was all machine-sewn."- Henrik Ibsen
"…Weaving a fiction which unravels as you weave…"- T. S. Eliot
"She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower…"- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
"Man did not weave the web of life: he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."-Seattle, Chief of the Duwamish, Suquamish and allied Indian tribes
"The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them."- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"…Just take a minute to explain all this computer madness besotted by science besotted by technology by this explosion of progress and the information revolution what we're really besotted by is people making millions, making billions from computer chips computer circuitry computer programs one man making thirty billion dollars in a year because that's what we've always been besotted by, Philo T Farnsworth had it right seventy years ago didn't he? What America's all about, what it's always been about that thirty billion dollars? What the computer's all about what all of it's all about, movie stars, ball players, what science is all about, try to pin it on some humble genius so Pascal shows up age nineteen with his digital adding machine, Leibniz with one that multiplies and divides and finally Babbage and his Difference Engine, Babbage and his Analytical Engine with its punched cards Babbage the grandfather of the modern computer so it's Babbage Babbage Babbage but he got his idea from Jacquard's loom so that's all you ever hear, Jacquard's loom Jacquard's loom Jacquard's loom hits you square in the belly…" William Gaddis, Agape Agape
"Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery."- Bertrand Russell
"Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man."- Martin Heidegger
"Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave."- Marshall McLuhan
"The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century- sex and paranoia."- J. G. Ballard
"The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night."- Jean Baudrillard
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