Welcome To The Machine

Electronic man is no abstraction, but rather the existing individual in a simultaneous culture. Having had his private inidividuality erased anonymously, he is paranoiac and much inclined to violence, for violence is a quest for identity, seeking to discover, "Who am I?" and "What are my limits?"
Marshall McCluhan 1971

All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external. The further the technical mechanism develops which allows us to excape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial necessities.
Jacques Ellul 1964

The belief that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere. A society which has lost belief in its capacity to progress in the future will quickly cease to concern itself with its progress in the past...our view of history reflects our view of society.
Edward.H. Carr 1961

Today...personal and social freedoms abound; and the general level of understanding of our precarious existential condition is growing, with the aid of mass education and the media. It is to be hoped that this increasing existential awareness will, before we annihilate ourselves in one way or another, overtake the controlling majority who have as yet not fully realized what it means to be human beings.
David.R. Cole 1982

Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions.
Erich Fromm 1957