Trevor Paglen Quotes

The advent of cellphones may, in the end, be no more relevant than the ability of laptops to change our written documents into ones using cool new fonts.

I really chess-play culture shifts. I'm really good at understanding what worldwide cell-phone use means. That's what I do. I try to picture it three to four to five steps ahead.

By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.

The institutions are working better now, the banks are much more functional. At this time, 1997, there were no mobile phones! It's a whole different thing now with mobile phones: technology has created a form of regulation, because people can actually talk to each other a lot more.

I watch for emergent technologies and pay attention to what people say they'll be good for, then see what we actually use them for. It never occurred to me that a tiny telephone with a wireless transceiver would do whatever it is that it's done to us.

It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides - after all, it's not a revolution if nobody loses.

People's behavior will change with technology. I know very few young people who can't type out a text message on their phone with one thumb, for instance.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

Look at electricity in human history - it took a few decades for electricity to really revolutionize the American economy. And the Internet will be the same. At some point in the future, we will arrive at a new era of low-hanging fruit.

This is a very different world. Much of it is new. What has happened is that information technology has politicized the world…It’s a world where most of the big problems spill over national boundaries.

All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations

Technology will move faster than governments, so don't legislate before you understand the consequences.

The coming of the wireless Era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.

IT put India on the map of the world and told Indians that they are somebody in the world. There is something about technology that is very empowering: 'We are designing software for the best companies in the world.'

Our mobile devices are so powerful that they don't just change what we do, they're changing who we are.

Information technology and the Internet are rapidly transforming almost every aspect of our lives - some for better, some for worse.

Technology doesn't just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are.

Technology is advancing at breakneck speed, upending old ways of doing business and resetting the social contract between employers and employees.

The computer is a mechanism for acceleration: it accelerates economic activity, and this is eating up the world. It's eating up resources, it's processing, it's manufacturing, it's distributing, it's consuming. That's what the computer's real work does, and it does that 24/7, 365 days a year, non-stop, just to satisfy our own narrow needs.

The technological revolution has the potential to liberate us or enslave us, and the road we take will depend on our politics.

Since Graham Bell came up with telephony, it took 100 years for the way the technology has impacted our lives, the way we perceive the world.

The 5G world will be a collaborative ecosystem, and the role of what each of us will do in that remains to be thought through.

Email did precisely what I predicted, back in 1978, it took over the postal mail process and system of writing letters.

I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom.