Sam’s Reviews > Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity > Status Update

"...the sacred and the digital not only don't mix, but are fatal to each other. They are in metaphysical opposition. That what comes through these screens bleeds out any connection with the divine, with nature or with the fullness of humanity."

"...even relatively simple technologies like the shaduf—a lever for lifting water from the river more efficiently—was not much used, even though it was known about. The issue was not a lack of technological knowledge; it was a concern about what its use might do to the shape of reality. [...] 'even simple technologies had moral and indeed cosmic implications.'"

"The left wants a world without borders that somehow also contains welfare states, while the right wants to defend the ethnic makeup of nations without acknowledging that traditional notions of ethnicity are increasingly impossible in the high-tech globalised world that has resulted from the capitalist economy they have always defended."