We're the new power, come to replace the old. Cameras in the head, children with microchips, spin doctors rewriting reality as it happens.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the transformative power of new technologies and the implications on perception and reality.
Grant Morrison's quote speaks to the dynamic shift in power dynamics influenced by technology, where a new generation, equipped with powerful tools like cameras and microchips, challenges and potentially replaces established norms and authority. It highlights the role of technology in shaping our understanding of reality, where the ability to document and manipulate information fundamentally alters how we perceive the world around us.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of technology on society, you could quote this to illustrate the shift towards a digital age.
A comic will always be more 'personal' than a DVD or CD, both of which require electronic 'players' to decode their content. With comics, the reader is the player so the engagement with the material is always more fundamental and dynamic. Reading comics is a much less passive activity than consuming CDs and DVDs.
American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting.
Gayness is built into Batman. I'm not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay.
I'm the evil mastermind behind the scenes. I'm the wicked puppeteer who pulls the strings and makes you dance. I'm your writer.
Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.
A cannon fires only once but words detonate across centuries
Surveillance technologies now available - including the monitoring of virtually all digital information - have advanced to the point where much of the essential apparatus of a police state is already in place.
Nintendo is a company of Kyoto craftsmen, and what we don't want to do is, if we know we can make something better, we don't want to leave that behind.
I believe those that produce the least emissions in autos will also be those who have the greatest success worldwide.
There's a danger in the internet and social media. The notion that information is enough, that more and more information is enough, that you don't have to think, you just have to get more information - gets very dangerous.
Now it's easy for someone to set up a storefront and reach the entire world in very modest ways. So these technologies that we thought would dis-intermediate traditional sellers gave more people the tools to be sellers. It also changed the balance of power between sellers and buyers.
Here I am, ninety years old and ready for the cooling board, using a brand new Macintosh computer, and there you sit, twenty-two and gorgeous, fresh as a new peach, yet scrawling on a yellow legal pad like an old maid in a Victorian romance.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.