“REJOICE!
For henceforth you are perfect! Up until this day your offspring, the machines, were more perfect than you.
IN WHAT WAY?
Every spark of the dynamo is a spark of purest reason. Every stroke of the piston is an immaculate syllogism. But do you not also contain this same infallible reason? The philosophy of the cranes, the presses, and the pumps is as perfect and clear as a circle drawn with a compass. But is your philosophy any less perfect? The beauty of the mechanism is in the precise and invariable rhythm, like that of a pendulum. But you-sustained as you were from infancy on the Taylorian system, are you any less pendulum-perfect?
But think of this:The mechanism has no imagination. When you were at work did you ever happen to see a distant, idiotic, dreamy smile spread across the physiogomy of a cylindrical pump? At night, during the hours designed for rest, did you ever happen to hear the cranes toss restlessly and heave sighs?
NO!
But-and you should be ashamed of yourselves!-the Guardians more and more frequently note that you yourselves smile and sigh in just this way. And-cover your eyes for very shame!-the historian of OneState are seeking to resign rather than record certain shameful events. But you are not to blame. You are sick.
The name of your illness is:
IMAGINATION.
This is the worm that eats out black wrinkles on the brow. This is the fever taht drives you to run farther and farther, even though 'farther' began in the place where happiness ends. This is the last barrier on the path to happiness. But rejoice: It has already been demolished. The path is free. The latest discovery of State Science: The imagination is centered in a wretched little brain node in the region of pons Varolii. Expose this node to three doses of X rays-and you are cured of imagination.
FOREVER.
You are perfect, you are the equal of the machine, the path to 100 percent happiness is free.
Hurry, then, all of you, young and old, hurry to undergo the Great Operation. Hurry to the auditoriums where the Great Operation is performed. Long live the Great Operation! Long live the OneState! Long live the Benefactor!”— Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“Transparency is the hell of the same.”— Byung-Chul Han

Like so many addictions, our short-term cravings are likely to be detrimental to our long-term well-being. By allowing ourselves to be surveilled and subtly regulated on a continuous, highly granular and pervasive basis, we may be slowly but surely eroding our capacity for authentic processes of self-creation and development— Karen Yeung, Hypernudge

If the individual’s understanding of himself as a subject emerges through the recognition of the other and the self, privacy, as the boundary between the two, is placed at the centre of identity, because privacy is what allows the self to become reflexive— Valerie Steeves, Reclaiming the Social Value of Privacy

Today the entire globe is developing into a panopticon. There is no outside space. The panopticon is becoming total. No wall separates inside from outside. Google and social networks, which present themselves as spaces of freedom, are assuming panoptic forms— Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society

Data flows generated within social media platforms extend beyond them, into a variety of secondary uses that are less consensual, including commercial profiling, background checking, criminal investigation and threat monitoring, trolling, and identity theft. There is persistent and mostly nontransparent slippage between the different kinds of uses, a state of affairs to which the vague, general privacy policies typically utilized by U.S. information businesses contribute— Julie Cohen, Studying Law Studying Surveillance

Ultimately, the proponents of personalization offer a vision of a custom-tailored world, every facet of which fits us perfectly. It’s a cozy place, populated by our favorite people and things and ideas. If we never want to hear about reality TV (or a more serious issue like gun violence) again, we don’t have to—and if we want to hear about every movement of Reese Witherspoon, we can. If we never click on the articles about cooking, or gadgets, or the world outside our country’s borders, they simply fade away. We’re never bored. We’re never annoyed. Our media is a perfect reflection of our interests and desires.— Eli Praiser, The Filter Bubble

We are all hostages of media intoxication,induced to believe in the war just as we were once led to believe in the revolution in Romania, and confined to the simulacrum of war as though confined to quarters We are all already strategic hostagea in situ; our site is the screen on which we are virtually bombarded day by day, even while serving as exchange value.- Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

The minds of telechirists are grappling with the problems of employing remotely-controlled machines to do the peaceful work of man amid the hazards of heat, radiation, space and the ocean floor. Have they got their priorities right? Should not their first efforts towards human safety be aimed at mankind’s most hazardous employment—the industry of war?Why should twentieth-century men continue to be stormed at by shot and shell when a tele- chiric Tommy Atkins could take his place? All conven- tional wars might eventually be conducted telechirically, armies of military robots battling it out by remote control, victory being calculated and apportioned by neutral com- puters, while humans sit safely at home watching on TV the lubricating oil staining the sand in sensible simile of their own blood...Far-flung imperial conquests which were ours because we had the Maxim gun and they had the knob- kerry will be recalled by new bloodless triumphs coming our way because we have telechiric yeomanry and they, poor fuzzy-wuzzies, have only napalm and nerve-gas.- Anonymous, Last Word on Telechirics

“There was nothing left for me to do, but go. Though the things of the world were strong with me still. Such as, for example: a gaggle of children trudging through a side-blown December flurry; a friendly match-share beneath some collision-titled streetlight; a frozen clock, a bird visited within its high tower; cold water from a tin jug; towering off one’s clinging shirt post-June rain. Pearls, rags, buttons, rug-tuft, beer-froth. Someone’s kind wishes for you; someone remembering to write; someone noticing that you are not at all at ease. A bloody ross death-red on a platter; a headgetop under-hand as you flee late to some chalk-and-woodfire-smelling schoolhouse. Geese above, clover below, the sound of one’s own breath when winded. The way a moistness in the eye will blur a field of stars; the sore place on the shoulder a resting toboggan makes; writing one’s beloved’s name upon a frosted window with a gloved finger. Tying a shoe; tying a knot on a package; a mouth on yours; a hand on yours; the ending of the day; the beginning of the day; the feeling that there will always be a day ahead. Goodbye, I must now say goodbye to all of it. Loon-call in the dark; calf-cramp in the spring; neck-rub in the parlour; milk-sip at end of day. Some brandy-legged dog proudly back-ploughs the grass to cover its modest shit; a cloud-mass down-valley breaks apart over the course of a brandy-deepened hour; louvered blinds yield dusty beneath your dragging finger, and it is nearly noon and you must decide; you have seen what you have seen, and it has wounded you, and it seems you have only one choice left. Blood-stained porcelain bowl wobbles face down on wood floor; orange peel not at all stirred by disbelieving last breath there among that fine summer dust-layer, fatal knife set down in pass-panic on familiar wobbly banister, later dropped (thrown) by Mother (dear Mother) (heartsick) into the slow-flowing, chocolate-brown Potomac. None of it was real; nothing was real. Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and in this way, brought them forth. And now we must lose them. I send this out to you, dear friends, before I go, in this instantaneous thought-burst, from a place where time slows and then stops and we may live forever in a single instant. Goodbye goodbye good-”- George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo