Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn't matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state
Interpretation
Technology shapes the structures and capabilities of society regardless of its political framework.
This quote suggests that the nature and development of technology play a crucial role in defining what a society can achieve, independent of its political ideologies. Whether a society is based on fascism, communism, or capitalism, the fundamental technology available dictates what is feasible for that society, emphasizing the power of technological advancement in shaping human experience and social organization.
In practice
In a discussion about technological impacts on society during a conference.
Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter.
Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances β and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse β then you don't have life after death; you just have death.
People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.
Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history
...and I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity; I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.
We're all vulnerable to social approval. The need to belong, to be approved or appreciated by our peers is among the highest human motivations. But now our social approval is in the hands of tech companies.
Our machines increasingly do our work for us. Why doesn't this make our labor redundant and our skills obsolete? Why are there still so many jobs?
Now anybody can make music at home, and you can hear music on any computer without having to buy it. Everything is apparently better with all the machines we have now, but at the same time, the quality of life is not improving.
Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
We should set a national goal of making computers and Internet access available for every American . . . we must help all Americans gain the skills they need to make the most of the connection.
Because the Internet is so new, we still don't really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that's what we're used to. So people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily trust what you read on the Web.
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