Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.
William Gibson – Neuromancer
Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind.
(..)
Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.
Thomas Carlyle – Signs of the Times
the real danger is not that machines will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like machines
Sydney J. Harris
He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance.
Karl Marx – The Communist Manifesto
What is being argued is that techno-science, under pressure from [Capital's red.] development, it’s paymaster, is overwhelmingly with improving
the operational efficiency of technological systems such that the human becomes irrelevant to the process. Development simply wants to continue expanding indefinitely and whatever restricts that internal dynamic merely registers as a problem to be overcome by ever greater levels of operational efficiency.
Stuart Sim – Lyotard and the Inhuman
If one wants to control a process, the best way of doing so is to subordinate the present to what is (still) called the ‘future’, since in these conditions the ‘future’ will be completely predetermined.
Jean-François Lyotard – The Inhuman
