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
In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?
Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community. So it's free as in freedom.
Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control.
Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before.
I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: "Macintosh - We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end".
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.