Via the Nature Institute be sure to read Stephen’s 1995 (!) book (online, free, or via Amazon). I am currently working translating his views into 2016… stay tuned!
“Can human ideals survive the Internet? His reply is only if we arouse ourselves to responsible consciousness”
“[T]oday the needful work is to distinguish ourselves from our machines. It is to rediscover, for example, that all knowledge of knowledge of man, and that nothing worth calling an ideal can be found in an engineered world, but only in ourselves.”
“Technologies– and especially digital technologies–powerfully invite us to forget ourselves. Whether it’s a matter of mindless channel surfing, or aimless drifting through a maze of hypertext links, or fleeing ourselves by climbing in our automobiles and driving to the mall, or skimming endless screens of text without making any effort to connect with the speaking self behind the words, or letting the promptings of a computer program substitute for the exercise of living judgment in the current moment — in many regards the technological society is a kind of paradise for human beings who wish to act on the level of automatons“
“It’s as if our choices were things that happened to us, not things we do.And, of course, this very attitude tends to make our choices into things that happen to us. They possess us, not the other way around. But this abdication is itself a choice. We choose to sleepwalk through our lives”
“Our technologies are working powerfully to entrain us in their automatisms”
“Swept up in the chaotic flow of the world our technology has created we are distracted, inattentive, restless. This leaves us incapable of what you call “conscious self-possession.” Some see in this phenomenon the making of a new, post-modern self, one with many personae but no unifying centre..”
“The computer represents a kind of perfection of our one-sided tendencies over the past several hundred years. It is a head without a chest. It nudges us toward the expression of form without any deeply felt content — like the equations of pure mathematics or the propositions of pure logic. It floods us with information as data. It encourages us to fragment and decontextualise things”
