“People who live within and benefit from modern industrial civilization have forgotten, and have been encouraged to forget, about the origins and provenance of fundamental thinking tools we all benefit from—rationality, progress, democratic self-governance, universal acceptance of the superiority of the scientific method to other ways of knowing. A specific manner of systematically examining the world, extracting knowledge, and applying that knowledge to extend power, a system that was developed only a few centuries ago, has been so extraordinarily successful that it has totally sucked our attention away from other, crucially important ways of knowing the world. Our technologized culture shapes and fascinates us to the extent we don’t even see other ways of knowing and interacting with the world and each other. As Langdon Winner claims, people in industrial, megatechnological civilization seem to sleepwalk through the world we’ve created, oblivious to the worlds that have been destroyed, never really thinking about the worlds technology will engender in years to come.”

— Howard Rheingold – Thinking About Thinking About Technology (1998)