Help Wanted

July 2004 Archive

What technology wants

The love of technology

I'm looking for passages from literature, science fiction, or personal essays of writers who wax lyrical and poetic about technology. A paragraph where they get all purple about the joy or grandure of a machine, technlogy or man-made landscape. Any suggestions? The more specific the reference, the better.

Posted on July 27, 2004 at 9:38 PM
What technology wants

What does technology want?

Yeah, I know that technology is not a person so it can't "want" something the way you want something. But a large system like technology can and does exhibit tendencies and urges overall, independent of individual human caretakers, and this is the meaning of "want" I have in mind. If you still have problems imagining how technology as a whole can want things, then I suggest you ignore this question and not post in this thread. For those who want to play, imagine that the Technium, the system of technological cutlure, has an agenda greater than the agenda of its parts, and that human preferences have little impact on its urges. If the Technium is a system with its own non-human agenda, what does it want? What are its inherent biases, trajectory, and desires? What does technology hope for?

Posted on July 13, 2004 at 11:01 PM