This is a private note that has been shared.
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
“In a way, I guess the third one’s been going on for some time, if you mean thinking machines. That would be the third revolution, I guess — machines that devaluate human thinking. Some of the big computers like EPICAC do that all right, in specialized fields.”
“First the muscle work, then the routine work, then, maybe, the real brainwork.”
“And any man who cannot support himself by doing a job better than a machine is employed by the government, either in the Army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps.”
“Halyard sputtered, manfully regained his poise, and wiped his face. “Isolated incident,” he said bitterly.”
“unconvincingly extroverted”
“Machines were doing America’s work far better than Americans had ever done it”
“Things are certainly set up for a class war based on conveniently established lines of demarcation. And I must say that the basic assumption of the present setup is a grade-A incitement to violence: the smarter you are, the better you are. Used to be that the richer you were, the better you were. Either one is, you’ll admit, pretty tough for the have-nots to take. The criterion of brains is better than the one of money, but” — he held his thumb and forefinger about a sixteenth of an inch apart — “about that much better.”
“archprophet of efficiency”
“She was a fat repository of truisms, adages, and homilies,”
“The house breathes with you, like good underwear”
“Brahouna, Takaru”
“The Ghost Shirt Society”
“Almost nobody’s competent, Paul. It’s enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.”
“What he still had to learn was that without rank, without guest privileges, he lived on a primitive level of social justice.”
“And the electronic writers,” said the girl bitterly.
“That’ll come, that’ll come,” said Halyard. “But Lord knows getting manuscripts isn’t any trick. That’s hardly the problem. Machinery’s the thing. One of the smaller clubs, for instance, covers four city blocks. DSM.”
“DSM?” said Khashdrahr.
“Excuse me. Dog Story of the Month.”
Khashdrahr and the Shah shook their heads slowly and made clucking sounds. “Four city blocks,” echoed Khashdrahr hollowly.
“Well, a fully automatic setup like that makes culture very cheap. Book costs less than seven packs of chewing gum. And there are picture clubs, too — pictures for your walls at amazingly cheap prices. Matter of fact, culture’s so cheap, a man figured he could insulate his house cheaper with books and prints than he could with rockwool. Don’t think it’s true, but it’s a cute story with a good point.”
“The way they keep culture so cheap is by knowing in advance what and how much of it people want. They get it right, right down to the color of the jacket. Gutenberg would be amazed.”
“The line has to be drawn somewhere, of course, because of the economics of the thing. In order to be self-supporting, a book club has to have at least a half-million members, or it isn’t worth setting up the machinery — the electronic billers, the electronic addressers, the electronic wrappers, the electronic presses, and the electronic dividend computers.”
“It’s the Golden Age of Art, with millions of dollars a year poured into reproductions of Rembrandts, Whistlers, Goyas, Renoirs, El Grecos, Degas, da Vincis, Michelangelos …”
“Utterly and always happy. And my husband says somebody’s just got to be maladjusted; that somebody’s got to be uncomfortable enough to wonder where people are, where they’re going, and why they’re going there. That was the trouble with his book. It raised those questions, and was rejected. So he was ordered into public-relations duty.”
“The old displaced conductor disappeared into the Constableville night, and Paul wondered at what thorough believers in mechanization most Americans were, even when their lives had been badly damaged by mechanization. The conductor’s plaint, like the lament of so many, wasn’t that it was unjust to take jobs from men and give them to machines, but that the machines didn’t do nearly as many human things as good designers could have made them do.”
“Farafangana”
“He looked helplessly at the automatic ticket vendor, the automatic nylon vendor, the automatic coffee vendor, the automatic gum vendor, the automatic book vendor, the automatic newspaper vendor, the automatic toothbrush vendor, the automatic Coke vendor, the automatic shoeshine machine, the automatic photo studio, and walked out into the deserted streets on the Homestead side of the river.”
“Nobody had anything for him to do anywhere. The economy was no longer interested.”
“This business of one set of values being replaced by force by another set of values has come up often enough in history —”
“Among the Indians and the Jews and a lot of other people who’ve been tyrannized by outsiders,” said Finnerty.
“Yes, it’s come up often enough for us to make a good guess as to what can happen this time,” said Lasher. He paused. “What we can make happen.”
“But, by some magic that’s beyond my comprehension, meetings get things done”
“If a Messiah shows up now with a good, solid, startling message, and if he keeps out of the hands of the police, he can set off a revolution — maybe one big enough to take the world away from the machines”
“Says it’s all he can do to figure out what he represents without trying to represent a thousand other people besides,”
Lasher smiled sadly. “The great American individual,” he said. “Thinks he’s the embodiment of liberal thought throughout the ages. Stands on his own two feet, by God, alone and motionless. He’d make a good lamp post, if he’d weather better and didn’t have to eat.”
“Paul felt as though he’d seen the surface scraped from a clean, straight rafter, and been shown the tunnels and flimsy membranes of a termite metropolis within.”
“You, the engineers and managers and bureaucrats, almost alone among men of higher intelligence, have continued to believe that the condition of man improves in direct ratio to the energy and devices for using energy put at his disposal. You believed this through the three most horrible wars in history, a monumental demonstration of faith.
“That you continue to believe it now, in the most mortifying peacetime in history, is at least disturbing, even to the slow-witted, and downright terrifying to the thoughtful.
“Man has survived Armageddon in order to enter the Eden of eternal peace, only to discover that everything he had looked forward to enjoying there — pride, dignity, self-respect, work worth doing — has been condemned as unfit for human consumption.”
“You perhaps disagree with the antique and vain notion of Man’s being a creation of God.
“But I find it a far more defensible belief than the one implicit in intemperate faith in lawless technological progress — namely, that man is on earth to create more durable and efficient images of himself, and, hence, to eliminate any justification at all for his own continued existence”
“But we cannot win good lives for ourselves in peacetime by the same methods we used to win battles in wartime. The problems of peace are altogether more subtle.”
“Without regard for the wishes of men, any machines or techniques or forms of organization that can economically replace men do replace men. Replacement is not necessarily bad, but to do it without regard for the wishes of men is lawlessness.”
“The machines,” said Paul, “have exceeded the personal sovereignty willingly surrendered to them by the American people for good government. Machines and organization and pursuit of efficiency have robbed the American people of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
“Most fascinating game there is, keeping things from staying the way they are.”
“If only it weren’t for the people, the goddamned people,” said Finnerty, “always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren’t for them, earth would be an engineer’s paradise.”
“It has all the characteristics of a lynching,” said the professor. “It’s on such a big scale, though, I suppose genocide is closer. The good die with the bad — the flush toilets with the automatic lathe controls.”
“We could bomb and strafe you, but that is not the American way. We could send in tanks, but that is not the American way.”
