#techno

It was the storm that would forever change the course of human destiny. ↗

— Jeff W. Horton

#cybersp-ce #science-fiction #techno-thriller #change

Piracy is robbery with violence, often segueing into murder, rape and kidnapping. It is one of the most frightening crimes in the world. Using the same term to describe a twelve-year-old swapping music with friends, even thousands of songs, is evidence of a loss of perspective so astounding that it invites and deserves the derision it receives. ↗

— Nick Harkaway

#culture #digital #ip #piracy #technology

Phones with numerical keypads worked best for dialing phone calls. Incidentally, phone calls tend to be the primary function of a phone. 'Smartphones' completely ignore these basic facts, resulting in some of the least intelligent devices I've seen yet. Oh the irony. ↗

— Ashly Lorenzana

#humor #opinion #phones #sarcasm #smartphones

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#relationships #technology #communication

Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#crowd #individuality #internet #mob #technology

At the root of Japanese manufacturing lies a feminine delicacy and shyness as well as a childlike curiosity and fantasy-filled worldview. ↗

— Morinosuke Kawaguchi

#design #japan #manga #technology #travel

The new fans of Japan won’t be Orientalists, but they will be anime-savvy. ↗

— Morinosuke Kawaguchi

#culture #japan #manga #technology #design

HOBBES: All this modern technology just makes people try to do everything at once. ↗

— Bill Watterson

#technology

Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories. ↗

— Laurie Anderson

#technology

Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process. Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990S had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely. If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form. It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#facebook #internet #myspace #technology #web