No more illusions about technology

No more illusions about technology. We do not control what we produce. Knowing how to do it doesn't mean we know what we are doing. Let's try to be a little more modest, and let's try to understand the riddle of what we produce. Inventions, the creations of scientists are riddles which expand the field of the unknown, so to speak. And there we have an inversion. This inversion is not pessimistic per se, it's an inversion of principle. We no longer start from a positivistic or negativistic idea, we start from a relativistic idea. The problem is the following: technology is a riddle, so let's work on the riddle and stop working only on technology.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 76-77