I found this comment by Paul Valery (1933), which seems so resonant today:
‘Never has there been such a profound and rapid transformation…the whole world… appropriated, even the most distant events known instantly…’
and
‘The number and importance of innovations introduced in so few years in the human universe has almost abolished any possibility of comparison between the way things were fifty years ago and the way they are now’
He was speaking of the huge rift in intellectual thought between the old comfortable mechanistic view of the world, and the deep uncertainty caused by recent discoveries in physics, chemistry and mathematics.
Today we experience change as rapid, necessary (if we are to believe those who will benefit from it) and inevitable.
We didn’t have to become digital. Yes – it has freed us to communicate, but at what price?
