Paul Virilio Quotes

Technology is a bit of a double-edged sword. Used right, it's a wonderful tool, but unfortunately, it makes it easier for a lot of mediocre people to get really crappy ideas out.

We can be incredibly disconnected in this day and age with computers and cell phones.

With everything that you can imagine at our fingertips, many of the social interactions that help tie people together in a community have faded away. Are communities traditionally built on relationships, trust and familiarity a thing of the past?

I am not a Luddite. I am suspicious of technology. I am perfectly aware of its benefits, but I also try to pay attention to some of the negative effects.

We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.

Technology is a wonderful thing, but I think it's violently misused.

The moment instant communications was within the grasp of all, America was bonded and annealed into an almost indivisible one.

As the world has changed through globalisation and technology, it has left many feeling left behind.

The great lesson in microeconomics is to discriminate between when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. And most people do not get this straight in their heads. But a fellow like Buffett does. For example, when we were in the textile business, which is a terrible commodity business, we were making low-end textiles-which are a real commodity product. And one day, the people came to Warren and said, "They've invented a new loom that we think will do twice as much work as our old ones."

Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat.

Whatever the advantages of the machine may be - and they are many - the very ease of its use is bound to make away with intimacy - the intercourse of human beings, of animals, or of that which we still think of as the natural world.

Were the stars out when I left the house last evening? All I could remember was the couple in the Skyline listening to Duran Duran. Stars? Who remembers stars? Come to think of it, had I even looked up at the sky recently? Had the stars been wiped out of the sky three months ago, I wouldn’t have known.

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.

I like to think there is something deep in our own world of reality that will create a dynamic balance between technology and human existence, the relationship between which has a decisive effect on contemporary cultural forms and social structure.

We have a lot of argument about laws but none of it solves the problem. Let's examine what happened, why did we miss the Tsarnaev brothers, why did we miss the San Bernardino couple? It wasn't because we had stopped collected metadata it was because, I think, as someone who comes from the technology world, we were using the wrong algorithms.

What we have come to, through a combination of popular psychology and expanding technology, is a presumption that all our thoughts and feelings are worth uttering.

I tell you, my fellow Americans, that if we learned anything from the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the governments in Eastern Europe, even a totally controlled society cannot resist the winds of change that economics and technology and information flow have imposed in this world of ours. That is not an option. Our only realistic option is to embrace these changes and create the jobs of tomorrow.

If Franz Kafka were alive today he'd be writing about customer service.

The moral of the story is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around.

He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.

If you ask what keeps me up at night, it's the pressure in the system forcing us to do all sorts of things. Content, data and technology are forcing us to think about business in a very different way.

Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.

I have been struggling to find my way back into my body my whole life.

The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.

There is a growing sense in America that being disconnected is not good. And there's also some people that are staying in their silos and not coming out, but we have to pull them out, and we have to pull ourselves together at some point, I think.