This volume marks the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the Quiet War. Already this domestic war has had many victories on many fronts throughout the world. Bill Cooper, Top Secret: Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, Operations Research Technical Manual TM-SW7905.1
In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything – telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return. Frank Church, NBC’s Meet the Press 17th August 1975
Technology has a great advantage in that we are capable of creating dinosaurs and show them on the screen even though they are extinct 65 million years. All of a sudden, we have a fantastic tool that is as good as dreams are. Werner Herzog
The paradox of our time is that humanity is becoming simultaneously more unified and more fragmented. That is the principal thrust of contemporary change. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era ch1
In our time the routinization of conflict has also meant a shift from sustained warfare to sporadic outbreaks of violence. ibid.
The impact of science and technology on man and his society, especially in the more advanced countries of the world, is becoming the major source of contemporary change. ibid.
But while our immediate reality is being fragmented, global reality increasingly absorbs the individual, involves him, and even occasionally overwhelms him. ibid.
The United States: A major disruptive influence on the world scene … No other society so massively disseminates its own way of life and values. ibid.
Marxism, born of the social upheaval produced by the combined effects of the industrial and nationalist revolutions provided a unique intellectual tool for understanding and harnessing the fundamental forces of our time. ibid. ch3
America’s relationship with the world must reflect American domestic values and preoccupations. ibid. ch5
The capacity to assert social and political control over the individual will vastly increase. It will soon be possible to assert almost continuous control over every citizen and to maintain up-to-date files, containing even the most personal details about health and personal behaviour of every citizen in addition to the more customary data.
These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. Power will gravitate into the hands of those who control information. Our existing institutions will be supplanted by pre-crisis management institutions, the task of which will be to identify in advance likely social crises and to develop programs to cope with them.
This will encourage tendencies through the next several decades toward a technetronic era, a dictatorship, leaving even less room for political procedures as we know them. Finally, looking ahead to the end of the century, the possibility of biochemical mind control and genetic tinkering with man, including beings which will function like men and reason with them as well, could give rise to some difficult questions. ibid.
Society dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behaviour and keeping society under close surveillance and control. ibid.
Nation state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state. ibid.
The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values ... Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up to date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. ibid.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. Aldous Huxley
Technology is the engine that drives society. Brave New World with Stephen Hawking II: Technology, Kathy Sykes, Channel 4 2011
Designers and engineers are constantly looking for better ways to manufacture the objects that surround us. ibid. Max Lamb, product designer
Technology touches all of our lives and changes them in ways that are hard to predict. ibid. Hawking
The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry. Harold Wilson
Technology ... the knack of so arranging the world that we need not experience it. Max Frisch, Homo Faber, 1957
More and more of that technology infiltrates every aspect of our lives. It’s become a life-support system without which we can’t survive. James Burke, Connections s1e1: The Trigger Effect, BBC 1978
What does survival without technology look like? ibid.
Tonight: the challenges for businesses and workers in the new age of technology. And the extent that our jobs might be at risk from new intelligent machines. Tonight: Man versus Machines, ITV 2014
How technology is a power-tool in the hands of stalkers. How some smart home gadgets are making it easier than ever. But do we fully understand this growing threat and how to protect ourselves. Tonight: Tech Abuse: Stopping the Stalkers, ITV 2020
The Science Museum: a mindboggling collection of hundreds of thousands of inventions all of which have changed our world. Everything from steam engines to some of the very first computers. Tomorrow’s World: A Horizon Special, BBC 2013
The exploration of space: twenty-first century inventors like Peter Diamandis ... In 2007 Diamandis set up the Google Lunar X Prize. ibid.
These moon missions have a more commercial edge than the Apollo Program. ibid.
Nanotechnology: graphene: one atom thick ... conductive. ibid.
The speed at which ideas now move around the world is one of the defining characteristics of today. ibid.
Langer: new materials – polymers – that could go inside the body. ibid.
At the heart of the open source movement is of course our ever-increasing connectivity. ibid
The process of invention is becoming a global conversation. ibid.
We’ll be delving back to the first episode in 1965 to chart how technology has changed over the last half century. Tomorrow’s World Live: For One Night Only, BBC 2018
‘Whether there’s a market for this kind of disc [CD] remains to be seen.’ ibid. presenter
‘Computers offer an endless source of inspiration.’ ibid.
One of the most iconic inventions of the 1980s: the C5, a battery-operated car. ibid.
Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle. James Surowieck
Nobody that has seen a baby born can believe in god for a second. When you see your child born, and the panic, and the amount of technology that is saving the life of the two people you love most in the world, when you see how much stainless steel and money it takes to fight off the fact that god wants both those people dead, no-one, no-one can look into the eyes of a newborn baby and say there’s a god, because I'll tell ya, if we were squatting in the woods, the two people I love most would be dead. There’s just no way around that. If I were in charge, no way. We need technology to fight against nature; nature so wants us dead. Nature is trying to kill us. Penn Jillette