But our mechanical triumph may have produced a mechanical atmosphere we can’t stand. So we may have reached a point where the design of our technology must take into greater account our interior needs.

Since one of the distorting by-products of technology is the collapse of human time, we could find ways to retard tempos to permit normal responses and accommodations.

There is another point to be made about “they,” about those who work in the bureaucratic situation. It has to do with the fact that a bureau, whether a great public agency, a department in a university, or a large corporation, tends to become a world for those inside it. With its special duties, its nice categories, its ordered set of rules, its ri

One of the things you can learn from history is that men have lived with machinery at least as well as, and probably a good deal better than, they have yet learned to live with one another.

The thing that at the time was on many of my colleagues’ minds as a new kind of inquiry—the kind of fashionable kick that so often appears to stimulate our intellectual life—was technological innovation, what Schumpeter called “the gale of creative destruction,” or, more simply, what happens when you change the machinery.

What these officers were saying was that the Wampanoag was a destructive energy in their society. Setting the extraordinary force of her engines against the weight of their way of life, they had a sudden insight into the nature of machinery. They perceived that a machine, any machine, if left to itself, tends to establish its own conditions, to cre

First stage: At first, there was no response.

The essential idea for change occurred in part by chance but in an environment that contained all the essential elements for change and to a mind prepared to recognize the possibility of change.

And this leads me to the second thing that occurs to the mind when it is exposed to the word bureaucracy and that is “red tape,” or what in more dignified terms is called “regulations.”