For our problems, like our means and opportunities, are of a scope beyond those of any previous age.

Every service environment breeds innumerable disservices. This inspired Baudelaire to label them Fleurs du Mal. These ancient flowers take new root and nurture from new technologies in unexpected ways.

The consequences for literature that stem from major changes in technology are only inevitable to the extent that they are unforeseen. Determinism is the result of the behaviour of those who are determined to ignore what is happening around them. Recognition of the psychic and social consequences of technological change makes it possible to neutralize the effects of innovation. If we maintain lively dialogue with, and among, the technologies, we can enlist them on the side of traditional values instead of watching those values disappear while we play the helpless bystanders.

Western man knows that his values and modalities are the product of literacy. Yet the very means of extending those values, technologically, seem to deny and reverse them.

Man-as-'Cyborg' can exploit the possibility either of total extension of his consciousness as a world environment or as a perpetual and collective organism of war.

We have moved into the age of the rip-off as a kind of a personal art form. What had formerly been an entrepreneurial way of life in the 19th century hardware world, the world of strip-mining and compulsive scrapping of resources, has now become an art form, a psychological software pattern.

If we refuse to see [the emerging technologies] at all, we will become their servants. It’s inevitable that the worldpool of electronic information movement will toss us all about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can come through.