Carlos

“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?”
― Langdon Winner, 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”
― Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology

“Fired by an emotional faith in spontaneity, the common-sense attitude toward change was discarded in favor of a mystical readiness to accept the social consequences of economic improvement,”
― Langdon Winner, 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”
― Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology