He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?
William GaddisRead
I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.
Interpretation
The player piano symbolizes the origin of modern computing, highlighting how technology can create limitations in our choices.
In this quote, William Gaddis reflects on the player piano as a precursor to computers, suggesting that just as the player piano automates music without the musician's input, modern technology has evolved to limit human agency through binary choices. Gaddis warns of a future where the simplistic dichotomy of 'yes' or 'no' eliminates the nuance of human experience, creating a nightmare of automation devoid of true freedom.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of automation on society.
He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?
Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.
Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.
How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible.
If you want to make a million you don't have to understand money, what you have to understand is people's fears about money
The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook's paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we - and the young, particularly - spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation.
Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
We say that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.
Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real time, and always-on. It’s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now—and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.
I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.
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