The Computerization of Contemporary Society

quotes compiled by Bruce Clifton, Free Press contributor

"There are several reasons why computers have become so important. They operate at extremely high speeds, have the ability to store and retrieve vast quantities of information, and can make decisions based on the results of previous operations. With just these primitive functions, a generation of programmers has created a body of software that can control a missile, intercept a message, predict the results of and election, or automate a factory."

--David Brandon and Michael Harrison, The Technology War

"Thanks to reliable data collected by computerization, a CEO and his team can skip over the company's middle-rung bureaucracy and directly command operations, from afar, including factories and markets dispersed around the world. The new work system tells workers to get smarter and promises to empower them with more authority on the shop floor. Yet it also creates a steeper pyramid between them and the commanding heights."

--William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism

"Only the paranoid survive."

--motto of Andrew Grove, CEO of Intel Corporation

"Automation has two key purposes. One is to pare down the number of workers to an absolute minimum, such as in AT&T's plans to replace thousands of telephone operators with computerized voice-recognition systems. The second is to minimize inventories by linking dispersed suppliers with marketing outlets using 'just-in-time' delivery of parts and supplies."

--David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

"With their activities and productivity constantly being directed and monitored by the computer hierarchy, workers find even less opportunity to exercise any control over their work lives. Their immediate oppressor becomes the programmed control device, the programming department, the printout--in short, the technology of production. In this environment, the human hierarchy and the capitalist organization of production that has produced the technology appear to recede. Control becomes truly structural, embedded in that hoary old mystification, technology."

--Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century

"The United States military sponsored by far the largest and broadest program for developing computer technology found anywhere in the world during the first decades of the digital computer.... the many start-up computer firms entering the US industry in the early and middle 1950s were chasing after a reasonably large market, dominated by military demand. For almost all these producers, the military was the first, and generally, the best customer."

--Kenneth Flamm, Creating the Computer: Government, Industry, and High Technology