Chuck Klosterman Quotes

We are living in an era of anxiety produced by computer and communications technology.

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

Change creates fear, and technology creates change. Sadly, most people don't behave very well when they are afraid.

Unsurprisingly, the most vocal opponents of new technologies are those who dominated the old.

There's clearly a lot of Ludditism, and you see it in all the hysteria about every scientific story.

I think people are scared of progress and change.

I avoided the computer generation for a very long time.

I'm a total Luddite when it comes to gadgets and technology.

Dating back at least as far as the Luddites of early 19th-century Britain, new technologies cause fear about the inevitable changes they bring.

We have to accept that capitalism is coming to an end. We can't provide paid employment for people, all the industries with technology are counter-intuitive to profit, and we have to have a transition to the conceptualist society. The only way to do it fairly is as a social democracy, a radical social democracy, which isn't compromised by neo-liberalism and isn't compromised by the rich, and isn't compromised by hegemonic, authoritarian interests: to have that balance between the government, the private sector, and then the individual citizens again.

People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favour progress, provided they can have it without change.

His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him.

To me, fear of the future means fear of technology. I have a little bit of that. I still use it, but I kind of see technology as this harmful thing that's so ingrained in my life that it sort of dictates and controls my relationship with it.

After living with their dysfunctional behavior for so many years, people become invested in defending their dysfunctions rather than changing them.

Given all that history has shown us of the consequences of technology - from the atlatl spear to the A-bomb - why have so few groups of human beings managed to resist the incursions of technology? Or be choosy about the extent to which they'll employ a technological innovation?

People like change in general, but not in particular.

I find so many people struggling, often working harder, simply because they cling to old ideas. They want things to be the way they were; they resist change. I know people who are losing their jobs or their houses, and they blame technology or the economy or their boss. Sadly they fail to realize that they might be the problem. Old ideas are their biggest liability. It is a liability simply because they fail to realize that while that idea or way of doing something was an asset yesterday, yesterday is gone.

I think people tend to be worried about every new technology that comes along.

People will suffer almost anything, as long as it means they don't have to change.

How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.

The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it. People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross. People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.

. . . Luddites were those frenzied traditionalists of the early 19th century who toured [England] wrecking new weaving machines on the theory that if they were destroyed . . . old jobs and old ways of life could be preserved . . . At certain times in his life each man is tempted to become a Luddite, for there is always something he would like to go back to. But to be against all change-against change in the abstract-is folly.

What Donald Trump is, is not movement of change, it's a reaction to global change, it's a total reaction to global change. It's transformational change in the world done by transportation, technology and all that. And people, most of Donald Trump's voters want to go back.

Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.

At the beginning of anything out of the ordinary, the mass of the people always dislike it.