A Call to Arms

From Letters from Lake Como (Explorations in Technology and the Human Race):

The new events deprive the people of the older culture of any possibility of being. (p.79)

...we must transform what is coming to be. But we can do this only if we honestly say yes to it and yet with incorruptible hearts remain aware of all that is destructive and nonhuman in it. (pp.80-1)

The fact that the machine brings a measure of freedom hitherto unknown is in the first instance a gain. The value of freedom, however, is not fixed solely by the question "Freedom from what?" but decisively by the further question "Freedom for what?" Every social pedagogue knows what problems arise regarding use of the time that is made free by machines. If we do not succeed in making meaningful use of the free days then the result of such "freedom" is negative. (p.110)