Men, Machines, and Modern Times, 50th Anniversary Edition

Since one of the distorting by-products of technology is the collapse of human time, we could find ways to retard tempos to permit normal responses and accommodations.

What these officers were saying was that the Wampanoag was a destructive energy in their society. Setting the extraordinary force of her engines against the weight of their way of life, they had a sudden insight into the nature of machinery. They perceived that a machine, any machine, if left to itself, tends to establish its own conditions, to cre

The particular solutions of engineers are on the whole local, limited by time and place and singularity.

The interesting question seems to be whether man, having succeeded after all these years in bringing so much of the natural environment under his control, can now manage the imposing system he has created for the specific purpose of enabling him to manage his natural environment.

This was the second stage—the attempt to meet Sims’s claims by logical, rational rebuttal.

And this leads me to the second thing that occurs to the mind when it is exposed to the word bureaucracy and that is “red tape,” or what in more dignified terms is called “regulations.”

So the first part of the problem appears to be whether we can now in fact discover the means to close the gap between the changes that destroy the old, which was not bad but is not, in the new dispensation, good and useful, and the developments which are to take the place of the old, but which do not take place fast enough. Put another way, can we

But I suggest that recently we’ve spent a good deal of time on improving the machine and that for a while we ought to concentrate on the other end. The problem is not primarily engineering or scientific in character. It’s simply human.

But, beginning with the nineteenth century, the situation had change. “His capacity is no longer so limited; man has now learned to manufacture power and with the manufacture of power a new epoch began.”