A specter is stalking in our midst whom only a few see with clarity.
It is not the old ghost of communism or fascism. It is a new specter: a completely mechanized society,
devoted to maximal material output and consumption, directed by computers; and in this social process,
man himself is being transformed into a part of the total machine, well fed and entertained,
yet passive, unalive, and with little feeling. With the victory of the new society, individualism and privacy
will have disappeared; feelings toward others will be engineered by psychological conditioning and
other devices, or drugs which also serve a new kind of introspective experience.
As Zbigniew Brzezinski put it, “In the technetronic society the trend would seem to be towards the
aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of
magnetic andattractive personalities effectively exploiting the latest communication techniques
to manipulate emotions and control reason.”
This new form of society has been predicted in the form of fiction in Orwell’s 1984 and
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Perhaps its most ominous aspect at present is that we seem to lose control over our own system.
We execute the decisions which our computer calculations make for us.
We as human beings have no aims except producing and consuming more and more.
We will nothing, nor do we not-will anything. We are threatened with extinction by nuclear weapons and
with inner deadness by the passiveness which our exclusion from responsible decision making engenders.
How did it happen? How did man, at the very height of his victory over nature, become the prisoner of his own creation
and in serious danger of destroying himself?
-- Erich Fromm, Towards a Humanized Technology (1967)