What follows are short quotes from the book:
These quotes are chosen to encourage discussion in class.
page 208
It is remarkable how the new period resembles the old in many little ways: the early 19th century was a period of vulgar theater, elephantine buildings, public obsession with murders and execu- tions, increasing fear of street crime, great enthusiasm for boxing and other violent spectator sports, and passions for running, bal- looning, and gambling of all kinds, including lotteries. But it is remarkable also that the large characteristics that served earlier to define the first Industrial Revolution can be applied, though with the same caution of erring toward the schematic and reductive, to the second as well.
page 208-209
This time around the technology is even more complex and exten- sive, and its impact even more pervasive and dislocating, touch- ing greater populations with greater speed and at greater scales. No one voted for this technology or any of the various machines and processes that make it up; no one explained or even thought much about what the consequences of any of them would be, singly or synergistically, on individual, society, or environment; and no one took responsibility for the transformations they have wrought, except insofar as governments were ultimately asked to care for the most ruinous results (poverty, pollution, unemploy- ment). It "just happened," in an onrush of industrial creation, swiftly and powerfully and inescapably. But the effects are pro- found, maybe more profound than we know.
Page 210
But the kind of technology shaping the second Industrial Revolution has its own special and inescapable logic, just as the one wrought by the steam engine had its, that goes beyond the proliferation of its machines and methods. Automation, for example, is an inevitable consequence of computerization and robotics, and serves to replace human endeavor in more and more ways in more and more settings. Simplification and rou- tinization are similar consequences in tasks where humans are still involved, deskilling and often dehumanizing the operatives and making them subject to minute monitoring and discipline.
Page 237
IN MARCH 1990, a New Mexico psychologist named Chellis Glendinning published "Notes toward a Neo-Luddite manifesto," an attempt to give legitimacy to those who in one way or another are troubled by, and resistant to, the technology of the second Industrial Revolution, and to prepare the ground for a statement that would articulate their critique and goals.
"Neo-Luddites have the courage to gaze at the full catastrophe of our century," she began, which is that "the technologies cre- ated and disseminated by modern Western societies are out of control and desecrating the fragile fabric oflife on Earth." And to underscore the link of present with past, she added, "Like the early Luddites, we too are a desperate people seeking to protect the livelihoods, communities, and families we love, which lie on the verge of destruction."
Page 265-267
Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines
What happens when an economy is not embedded in a due regard for the natural world, understanding and coping with the full range of its consequences to species and their ecosystems, is not only that it wreaks its harm throughout the biosphere in indiscriminate and ultimately unsustainable ways, though that is bad enough. It also loses its sense of the human as a species and the individual as an animal, needing certain basic physical ele- ments for successful survival, including land and air, decent food and shelter, intact communities and nurturing families.
At a certain point, one that we have reached in the 2oth century, technology can completely overwhelm so many other elements of that world as to threaten its continued existence, and unless the technosphere re-establishes some connectedness to the biosphere it seems likely to carry out that threat.
Page