#technology (77 quotes)
If you know how to make people that happy, you know how to make them miserable as shit. Whatever this island world could be, take it away. If they want nature, make them look at screens. If they like quiet, make the world noisy. If they want community, split them up. If they want time to think, interrupt them all the fucking time. If they want real human companionship, tempt them with artificial matchbox-and-bead FantailPals.
— , The Future The only thing it’s like is the Gutenberg print revolution and that was followed by four hundred years of bloody war. Suddenly, people were exposed to so much more information than ever before. They had no systems to process it or to tell truth from lies. They were overwhelmed. That’s where we are.
— , The Future Cyberpunk, however brief its reign, gave us the tools, the themes, and the vocabulary to understand the madness to come.
— , The Big Book of Cyberpunk Vol. 1 Attention becomes the only metric by which culture is judged, and what gets attention is dictated by equations developed by Silicon Valley engineers. The outcome of such algorithmic gatekeeping is the pervasive flattening that has been happening across culture. By flatness I mean homogenization but also a reduction into simplicity: the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most. Flatness is the lowest common denominator, an averageness that has never been the marker of humanity’s proudest cultural creations.
— , Filterworld Where others see a website that’s good for wasting time, Germans see a comprehensive surveillance tool that needs muscular oversight.
— , Careless People Every level of complexity floats freely on the last, supported only by abstractions.
— , Schismatrix Plus The girl’s hands darted over the keyboards and the air was filled with the tones of that most ancient of Japanese instruments: the synthesizer.
— , Schismatrix Plus For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucket-loads of crap. Our analogue ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it out mechanically. Rewrites cost them months, metres of ink-ribbon and pints of Tipp-Ex. Poor sods. On the other hand, if digital technology is so superior a midwife of the novel, where are this century’s masterpieces?
— , The Bone Clocks The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust!
— , A Visit From the Goon Squad Since his first waking, he’d found twenty-second-century technology easy to work. User interfaces seemed to have settled down to common standards some time before he’d been frozen. Even the language had stabilised, more or less, if not the accents; English was spoken across several worlds now and had to stay comprehensible to everybody, and there was a huge mass of recorded culture, all of which tended to keep the language static. The vehicles and vocabularies of the year 2166 were easy. It was the people he couldn’t figure out.
— , Proxima The system offered a simulation of access, rather than the real thing. Tyler said this with a note of disappointment, even betrayal, but it sounded to me like standard user interface. Despite their excitement, they were in exactly the same position I was: they didn’t understand the core systems at all.
— , In Ascension We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.
— , Exhalation All of which helps clarify what’s so alarming about the contemporary online ‘attention economy’, of which we’ve heard so much in recent years: it’s essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. And you have far too little control over your attention simply to decide, as if by fiat, that you’re not going to succumb to its temptations.
— , Four Thousand Weeks The technologies we use to try to ‘get on top of everything’ always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the ‘everything’ of which we’re trying to get on top.
— , Four Thousand Weeks As the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure.
— , MaddAddam The Web, he saw, allowed everyone everywhere to develop the same otaku obsessions—with television, coffee, sneakers, guns. The mere possibility of such knowledge lay like a scrim over the world. A physical object was also a search term: an espresso wasn’t just an espresso; it was also Web pages about crema, fair trade, roasting techniques, varieties of beans. Things were texts; reality had been augmented. Brand strategists revised the knowledge around objects to make them more desirable, and companies, places, Presidents, wars, and people could be advantageously rebranded, as though the world itself could be reprogrammed. It seemed to Gibson that this constant reprogramming, which had become a major driver of economic life, was imbuing the present with a feeling—something like fatigue, or jet lag, or loss.
— , How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real Technologies are not value-free. If you choose a technology, you are implicitly accepting the political imperatives that provide the context the technology operates within. If you want railroads, you must accept coal and steel industries, compulsory seizure of land for rights-of-way, standard railway time, and central stations.
— , Dark State How to be more present, more mindful? Of ourselves, of others? For others? You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away, the ability to just sit there … That’s being a person … Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty – forever empty.
— , Feel Free Software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible.
— , Feel Free Something we don’t usually notice—but which becomes apparent if we zoom out as far as possible—is that Google Maps is giving us the world in an aggressively distorted form. Google tweaks our perception by using a version of the classic projection called Web Mercator, which is identical to its forebear save for one crucial difference. GPS receivers translate GPS data into latitude and longitude points using, as reference, an irregularly shaped model of the world called an ellipsoid, which closely approximates the actual shape of the earth. Web Mercator considers the earth to be a perfect sphere. Google Maps receives latitude and longitude computed using one model of the planet, and then does its own computation to project it onto a visual interface that uses a different model.
— , Pinpoint Computers were the bones, but imagination, ambition and possibility were the blood. These kids, they simply did not accept that the world as it is has any special gravity, any hold upon us. If something was wrong, if it was bad, then that something was to be fixed, not endured. Where my generation reached for philosophy and the virtue of suffering, they reached instead for science and technology and they actually did something about the beggar in the street, the woman in the wheelchair. They got on with it. It wasn’t that they had no sense of spirit or depth. Rather they reserved it for the truly wondrous, and for everything else they made tools.
— , Gnomon The internet: always proving that you’re not quite as special as you suspected.
— , Sourdough The world, made complex by technology, was becoming simple again, its technology hidden deeply behind the face of reality.
— , The Dark Forest Here they were, on the only planetary surface on which you could walk freely, naked to the wind and the sun, and when they had a choice, they sat in boxes and stared at littler boxes, just as if they had no choice—as if they were in a space station—as if the bad old days of the caged centuries had never gone away. They didn’t even look up at the stars at night.
— , 2312 Some actions, some feelings, one might venture, simply do not have ways to be effectively compressed, discretized, quantified, operationalized, proceduralized, and gamified; and that lack, that absence, makes them unalgorithmic.
— , Aurora