Destroy The Machine

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation…tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation. ~Jean Arp

Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences. ~Lewis Mumford

Technology presumes there’s just one right way to do things and there never is. ~Robert M. Pirsig

The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men. ~Havelock Ellis

Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines. ~Erich Fromm

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

The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology. ~E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, 1973

Technology… is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ~C.P. Snow, New York Times, 15 March 1971

Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. ~Albert Einstein

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David Jonsson

barefoot runner, deafhood advocate, holographic projection, off-grid aspirant
david@brotheryellow.com