Some quotes from Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel about ‘a totally automated American society of the future’:
“The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings, not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.”
“Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.”
“For generations they’ve been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men-and boom! It’s all yanked out from under them. They can’t participate, can’t be useful any more. Their whole culture’s been shot to hell.”
“This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy war: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn’t in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday’s snow job becomes today’s sermon.”
“People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don’t apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.”
“What have you got against machines?”
“They’re slaves.”
“Well, what the heck, I mean, they aren’t people. They don’t suffer. They don’t mind working.”
“No. But they compete with people.”
“That’s a pretty good thing, isn’t it – considering what a sloppy job most people do of anything?”
“Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave.”
And from 1980, an excerpt from an interview with Vonnegut where he explains the origins of the novel:
“I began that book before the word ‘automation’ had been coined by the Ford Motor Company. As I recall it, I was a public relations man—a public relations boy, actually—for General Electric and part of my job obliged me to work with a group of engineers. One day I came across an engineer who had developed a milling machine that could be run by punch cards. Now at the time, milling machine operators were among the best paid machinists in the world, and yet this damned machine was able to do as good a job as most of the machinists ever could. I looked around, then, and found looms and spinning machines and a number of textile devices all being run the same way and, well, the implications were sensational. I now realize that the textile industry was dedicated to devising ways to run its machines without people and, to a great extent, it was highly successful.”
