Alex Steffen Quotes

The Internet has made some phenomenal breakthroughs that are still only poorly understood in terms of changing people's ideas of us and them. If mass media, social isolation in the suburbs, alienating workplaces and long car commutes create a bunker mentality, the Internet does the opposite.

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

It seems there is no area in our culture that is not touched, changed, even swallowed by the Internet. It's both medium and message, mass and personal, social and solitary.

We were promised a simpler life, and technology has only complicated our lives.

The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially.

If you run from technology, it will chase you.

Obviously technology has become such a big presence in our lives and, I definitely know, in my life.

Luddism is no longer with us, but today we seem to be overtaken by its opposite, the inevitability of technological change coupled with the blind belief in capitalism's ability to provide us with all we need.

Technology has become our culture

The future has both gritty and savage and clean and 'techno-hip.' I think it's a very realistic point of view.

Whether one welcomes or deplores it, nothing is more surely and exactly characteristic of modern times than the irresistible invasion of the human world by technology. Mechanism invading like a tide all the places of the earth and all forms of social activity.

I think technology and smartphones created a huge paradigm shift that we can't fully comprehend, and I think in a lot of ways things are changing faster than we can really process.

Do I think technology is bad? No. I think it's wonderful that the world is so connected now. But I think, as a result, childhood ends a little earlier.

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

The automobile, practical since 1906, was proceeding to disintegrate and stamp anew the pattern of communication, manners, and city life in the United States, by 1918; before long, men would begin to see that the automobile, and the mass production techniques which made its possible, could alter the national character and morality more thoroughly than could the most absolute of tyrants. As a mechanical Jacobin, it rivaled the dynamo. The productive process which made these vehicles cheap was still more subversive of the old ways than was the gasoline engine itself.

Technological change always accelerates. It never stagnates over time. Which means we are going to face the fact that, if nothing in the States changes, we will find ourselves dependent on other countries for almost everything that can and will be manufactured in a quickly approaching future.

My obsession is with technology and how it can improve human life. In my view, what we have seen in the last 300 years is only a trailer.

With the appearance of communications networks and interconnected computers, we got the world wide web, and it changed the lives of most people, I think.

Obama was the first American president to see technology as an engine to improve lives and accelerate society more quickly than any government body could.

I think our kids live an extraordinarily different life than what I lived growing up. Pretty much everything about their life is different than mine was.

I'll say that technology will make revolutions start happening faster, but it'll make them harder to finish. Technology can't create leaders and cause institutions to appear.

Ever since about 1998, when humankind began fast-forwarding through the gradually-unfolding history of progress, like someone impatiently zipping through a YouTube clip in search of the best bits, we've grown accustomed to machines veering from essential to obsolete in the blink of a trimester.

The technological revolution has the potential to liberate us or enslave us, and the road we take will depend on our politics.

There's just always going to be both positives and negatives to any evolution that we're a part of. And there's really no stopping the evolution of technology. There has been more and more integration in our daily lives, so we become more and more dependent on it.

When we talk about technology, often, we talk about the fact that it's going to be cool; it's going to do all these things for us. But at the same time, technology will deeply change our societies.