#techno

If it squirms, it's biology. If it stinks, it's chemistry. If it doesn't work, it's physics. And if you can't understand it, it's mathamatics. ↗

— Magnus Pyke

#science

A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#quality #quantity #technology #web #science

It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#society #technology #science

Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first. I say that information doesn't deserve to be free. Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not? ... Information is alienated experience. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#information #internet #technology #experience

I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural artifacts worthy of their attention and respect. ↗

— Bruno Latour

#love

Hi there," squeaked a precocious little voice, "you are speaking to Chloe Fusakawa, and I have just learned how to answer the phone. ↗

— Gabrielle Zevin

#kids #little-kids #technology #humor

There is a world out there, so new, so random and disassociated that it puts us all in danger. We talk online, we ‘friend’ each other when we don’t know who we are really talking to – we fuck strangers. We mistake almost anything for a relationship, a community of sorts, and yet, when we are with our families, in our communities, we are clueless, we short-circuit and immediately dive back into the digitized version – it is easier, because we can be both our truer selves and our fantasy selves all at once, with each carrying equal weight. ↗

— A.M. Homes

#technology #equality

TELEPHONE n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance. ↗

— Ambrose Bierce

#technology #humor

Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#humor #sex #technology #technophobes #wit

Technology doesn’t change people’s basic needs or their natures. ↗

— Priya Ardis

#technology #change