James Gleick Quotes

I am totally anti-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.

Standing beneath the white light of an Apple store is like standing on a Stanley Kubrick movie set. His '2001: A Space Odyssey' predicted Jobs and a future where technology was our friend. Kubrick, of course, didn't like what he saw. And occasionally, I have my doubts.

I think that we live in techno-enthusiastic times. We celebrate our technologies because people are frightened by the world we've made.

Luddism is no longer with us, but today we seem to be overtaken by its opposite, the inevitability of technological change coupled with the blind belief in capitalism's ability to provide us with all we need.

All the world's combined knowledge is at our fingertips. But the same technology that makes this possible is robbing us of deeper insight.

I truly hope that we can evolve with technology, and use it for the benefit of all mankind, but history might suggest otherwise.

There's a lot of things lost in the Digital Age.

People always think they're in the middle of a revolution while they tend not to realize the enormity of a change that has happened in the past. The telegraph was a revolution, but who looks at it that way these days? The telegraph sped up the transportation of messages over long distances by a huge factor.

Technology is not destiny.

Every time a new technology comes along, we feel we're about to break through to a place where we will not be able to recover. The advent of broadcast radio confused people. It delighted people, of course, but it also changed the world.

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

Technological defeatism - a belief that, since a given technology is here to stay, there's nothing we can do about it other than get on with it and simply adjust our norms - is a persistent feature of social thought about technology. We'll come to pay for it very dearly.

Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.

Unless technology itself is drastically repressed, the idea of the dystopian monoculture like Orwell's 1984 gets harder to believe. But the danger of a solipsistic society will grow, of a disconnected society of mirror-watchers and navel-gazers.

Asians love technology. They see it as the path to a good life. This is not so in Europe where there is much skepticism about technology—maybe because of Nazi Germany and its use of technology.

The next great technology revolution might be around the corner, but it won't automatically improve most people's lives. That will depend on politics, which is indeed ugly but also inescapable.

I think I'm a person that's very pessimistic about, like I'm not a luddite but I don't think we need to crack the code of technology and bring forth a future techno utopia.

We are all living in a techno-dystopian fantasy, the Internet-connected portals we rely on rendering the world in all its granular detail and absurdity like Borges's 'Aleph.'

The Internet has heralded a revolution in our society. It has transformed the way we do business, entertain, communicate, and travel. In many ways, the change has been positive. The web has brought new freedoms, spurred economic growth, and extended the boundaries of knowledge.

I used to have the very standard worldview. I can easily identify with people who see computers getting faster and smarter, and technology getting more and more beneficial, without seeing the other side.

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

A global society is coming into being, a global society that is made out of information that was not intended to be ours, but is ours, by the mistaken invention of computers and the printing press, information is power, and information has spilled by the clumsy hands of the dominator culture so that the information is everywhere, never before has the situation been so fluid, we might be able to finally have a crack at this

It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity.

The digitization of our society is a challenge that is both legislative and philosophical.