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“While it has wonderful appeal, decentralization turns out to be a very slippery concept. How can it have any importance in a society thoroughly enmeshed in centralized patterns?”
― The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
― The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
“Over many decades technological optimists have been sustained by the belief that whatever happened to be created in the sphere of material/instrumental culture would certainly be compatible with freedom, democracy, and social justice. This amounts to a conviction that all technology—whatever its size, shape, or complexion—is inherently liberating. For reasons noted in the previous chapter, that is a very peculiar faith indeed.”
― The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
― The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
“There is the capitalist approach (make it bigger), the technocratic one (make it better), the ‘revolutionary’ solution (portray the problem as an example of an exploitative system) and the pre-industrial romantic fallacy (don’t use it; maybe it will go away by itself). We propose a fifth alternative response: Let’s invent a different answer.”28”
― The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
― The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
“Are we going to design and build circumstances that enlarge possibilities for growth in human freedom, sociability, intelligence, creativity, and self-government? Or are we headed in an altogether different direction?”
― The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
― The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
“Freedom indeed depends largely on technical progress, on the advancement of science. But this fact easily obscures the essential precondition: in order to become vehicles of freedom, science and technology would have to change their present direction and goals; they would have to be reconstructed in accord with a new sensibility—the demands of the life instinct. Then one could speak of a technology of liberation, product of a scientific imagination free to project and design the forms of a human universe without exploitation and toil.”13”
― The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
― The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
Carlos’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Carlos’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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