Category Archives: Quotes

Excerpts from Richard Capes’ interview with David Edwards (Medialens co-editor and author of Free to be Human): To work for a corporation is to be part of a system in which power flows strictly from the top down – it’s a totalitarian power structure. That’s the lot of enormous numbers of people in the world. [...]

Erich Fromm extract taken from his book Man for Himself. We listen to every voice and to everybody but not to ourselves. We are constantly exposed to the noise of opinions and ideas hammering at us from everywhere: motion pictures, newspapers, radio, idle chatter. If we had planned intentionally to prevent ourselves from ever listening [...]

More from David Noble, again taken from his book Progress Without People, from a section titled Behind the Technical Screen. Much of what he wrote in the 80s and 90s still applies today to all kinds of professionals (not only technical people), including interaction designers (thinking we’ll serve humanity in our professional roles is mostly [...]

David Noble writing about technological progress in the first industrial revolution, taken from his book Progress Without People: New Technology, Unemployment, and the Message of Resistance: With regard to technological change, [leaders of labour] adopted an official posture of encouragement, accommodation, and acceptance. They were, after all, progressive, and no progressive is against progress. Besides, [...]

Dan Hind on ‘serious’ news, from his excellent new book The Return of the Public: When ‘serious’ coverage becomes more unreliable the more important the subject under investigation is, much of the population refuses to take it seriously enough to watch it or to read it. Some of them turn instead to entertainment, celebrity and [...]