T. C. Boyle Quotes

Everything depends on whether the technological disposition is allowed to proceed to its self-augmenting limits, or whether it can be restricted and brought under intellectual, spiritual, moral, and political rule.

... as the world rapidly becomes a civilization of machines, the masters of machines will increasingly be the ones in control of the world.

A movie like 'Transcendence' may be pertinent in its political reverberations of all computer data held in a cloud and monitored by the NSA, but it also rails against the tools its makers so artfully employ.

Technology is like the 666 because it controls us.

The computers are in control. We just live in their world.

The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.

We live in a bizarre world - there are cameras in our house!

Technology is not destiny.

I just think that we're living in a world where the technology is advancing so rapidly. You're having cameras that are capable of more and more - the resolution on cameras is jumping up.

We are moving into a world where companies will be able to offer us products and services based on our last two hours of activity. This is both exciting and frightening at the same time.

When you have a smartphone, the things that it can do are kind of ridiculous and terrifying.

There are so many classic Big Brother warning books: the Internet is a horrible, controlling thing, as if it has a consciousness or political agenda.

if we make technology the predestined force in our lives, man will walk to the measure of its demands. We know how leveling that influence can be, how easy it is to computerize man and make him a servile thing in a vast industrial complex. ... This means we must subject the machine -- technology -- to control…

The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier, and the ability of computers to track us doubles every eighteen months.

In the coming years, breakthroughs in transparency will come from Silicon Valley rather than Geneva.

Technology is, in many respects, an enabler for an open, transparent society. But it's also an enabler for supervision to a completely unforeseen degree. And for commercialising personal space to an unforeseen degree.

The use of drones to improve public safety, agriculture and other uses will only increase.

I'm really excited by science and technology and the whole social media thing. I think it's fascinating. But at the same time I'm wary of bureaucratic systems and managers.

I don't know how effective it is or isn't, but there's something weird about putting cameras on human beings, and talking on camera.

When I was a kid, there were really only two possible futures in the foreground, which were Orwell's '1984' and Huxley's 'Brave New World'.

Hitler's dictatorship was the first of an industrial estate in this age of modern technology, a dictatorship which employed to perfection the instruments of technology to dominate its own people. By means of such instruments of technology, eighty million persons could be made subject to the will of one individual. Telephone, teletype, radio, made it possible to transmit the commands of the highest levels directly to the lowest organs where they were executed uncritically

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It's really that simple: Program, or be programmed. Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.

Accusations fit on Greenwald really sounds like he's against all surveillance unless you can find a guy with the Al Qaeda card, wearing an Al Qaeda baseball cap, an Al Qaeda uniform.

The NSA buys data from private companies, so the private companies are the source of all this stuff.