El-P Quotes

Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilization. For them, such a charge is worse than that of crime.

Communication always changes society, and society was always organized around communication channels. Two hundred years ago it was mostly rivers. It was sea-lanes and mountain passes. The Internet is another form of communication and commerce. And society organizes around the channels.

We remake the world through our technologies, and these in turn remake and extend us, in ever spiraling lattices of complexity. McLuhan uncannily foresaw the future, where electronic technology would shape and expand cultures and societies into a global membrane of communications.

Trusting someone was like holding a little water in your cupped hands - it was so easy to spill the water, and you could never get it back.

So many social changes are as irreversible as the reaction when sodium is thrown into water.

The entire human race faced a singularity when one small group discovered, ooh, technology. We can live a different way. Eventually, that spelled the death of the old way of life.

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.

My hands are clean, but not because I wasn't prepared to bloody them.

Our hands we open of our own free will, and the good flies, which we can never recall.

The most important part about tomorrow is not the technology or the automation, but that man is going to come into entirely new relationships with his fellow men. He will retain much more in his everyday life of what we term the naïveté and idealism of the child. I think the way to see what tomorrow is going to look like is just to look at our children.

Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.

The ethical debates are like stones in a stream. The water runs around them. You haven't seen any biological technologies held up for one week by any of these debates.

Smart technologies are not just disruptive; they can also preserve the status quo. Revolutionary in theory, they are often reactionary in practice.

Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable.

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

We now have in our hands—really, in our libraries—the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next seven billion years.

Humans change themselves through technology.

Every moment comes to you pregnant with divine purpose . . . . Once it leaves your hands and your power to do with it as you please, it plunges into eternity, to remain forever what you made it.

Technology has a lot to do with how the world is developing at the moment because there are very raw and pure and primal emotions that people are communicating to each other over the Internet.

I think today we've gone so far technologically and also just emotionally and psychologically, I mean there's a lot of crime out there and there's a lot of stuff going on. People don't care that they're going to go to prison. They couldn't give a rat about the repercussions. They go out and they do what they do and they don't care about hurting anyone else.

Spin-off technologies are changing the culture. Even if you don't become an engineer you could be a poet, a journalist, a lawyer, but you will be thinking innovation and your actions within society, who you vote for, what you value, all become a participant in an innovation economy.

Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.

The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

The opposite of manliness isn't cowardice; it's technology.

The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. Someone the other day said, "It's the biggest thing since Gutenberg," and then someone else said "No, it's the biggest thing since the invention of writing."