Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

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.

Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.

People have long feared that mechanization might cause mass unemployment. This never happened because, as old professions became obsolete, new professions evolved, and there was always something humans could do better than machines. Yet this is not a law of nature, and nothing guarantees it will continue to be like that in the future.

First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ...? Then you serve machines.

If India becomes the slave of the machine, then, I say, heaven save the world.

I am all for your using machines, but do not let them use you.

I have been photographing the portrait of an end of an era, as machines and computers replace human workers. What we have in these pictures is an archeology.

For most purposes, a man with a machine is better than a man without a machine.

Machine makers always run the risk of becoming totally machine.

Journalistic content is a technical complex expressly intended to adapt man to the machine.

It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.

Machines don't use machines.

Machines cannot make machines, unless back of them all are the brains and toil of men.

If people start to buy the idea that machines are great companions for the elderly or for children, as they increasingly seem to do, we are really playing with fire.

Technological change always accelerates. It never stagnates over time. Which means we are going to face the fact that, if nothing in the States changes, we will find ourselves dependent on other countries for almost everything that can and will be manufactured in a quickly approaching future.

As for ourselves, we love our machines.

Swarms are one very simple way of keeping ourselves ahead of the machines.

Deskilling devices - they make us dumber. We're immersed in a system that now requires the use of a cell phone just to get around, just to function, and so the logic of that cell phone has been imposed on us.

As we get sucked more and more into the technosphere, we become less and less capable of understanding it because it becomes a technological milieu that we're in.

I grew up using maps and having a sense of direction, and now I have a phone. I used to try to remember numbers, and now I... can just call them up instantly. And that's great. But what's happening right now is that we're in a phase of human evolution where we're merging with machines.

We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action of the machine we have created to serve us.

Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines.

As machines get to be more and more like men, men will come to be more like machines.

Living in a time of the increasing struggle of the mechanization of man, photography has become another example of this paradoxical problem of how to humanize, how to overcome a machine on which we are thoroughly dependent... the camera.

Run for your lives-the computers are invading. Awesomely powerful computers tackling ever more important tasks with awkward, old-fashioned interfaces. As these machines leak into every corner of our lives, they will annoy us, infuriate us, and even kill a few of us. In turn, we will be tempted to kill our computers, but we won't dare because we are already utterly, irreversibly dependent on these hopeful monsters that make modern life possible.