"With this new 'megatechnics' the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super- planetary-structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man's role, will either be fed into the machine, or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organizations."

“No mechanical system knows the meaning of meaning.”

So they true evolutionary value of hands, for humans, was that they "liberated the mouth for speech."

Man's most serious undertaking has never been work nor tool making, but playfulness.

Predecessors who mistakenly coupled their mechanical progress w/ an unjustifiable sense of their increasing moral superiority

Without human's capacity to give symbolic form to experience, the universe would be empty of meaning.

“Against the lawless absolutism of his unconscious, man needed a lawful counter-force equally absolute.”

While ritual played an important role in man's development, it "succeeded only with a certain loss of creativity."

”For among most primitive peoples, matters of fact and matters of magic are equally real.”

“A large part of all magic formulae consists of a precise series of nonsense syllables repeated as nauseam. This is perhaps the buried bedrock foundation of all language.”

“By sedulously cultivating metaphor, I suggest primitive man first developed playfully and dramatically the art of language, well before he learned to put it to effective use for accurate description and record...”

“So remarkable is the actual power of words that man often succumbed to the temptation ... to apply verbal incantations or exhortions in situations where they could have no efficacy.”

“Language has surpassed any other form tool or machine as a technical instrument.”

“Because of the stability of every language, each generation has been able to carry over and pass on a significant portion of previous history.”

Early man lived by his wits: “At the beginning ‘braininess’ stood him in better stead than either ferocity or dogged industry.”

For early man, “tradition was more precious than invention. To keep even the smallest gain was more important than to make new ones at the risk of forgetting or forfeiting the old.”

“The pursuit of significance crowns every other human achievement.”

“Though words are often described as tools, they may be more properly regarded as the cells of a complex living structure, units quickly mobilized in orderly formations to function on particular occasions for particular uses.”

Language “all too easily inflated the ego and made people over-rate the efficiency of words in controlling the visible and invisible forces that surround man.”

Caveman selfies: “Ancient cave finds show that one of the phenomena man investigated most eagerly and altered most ingeniously was his own physical body.”

“In collecting food man was also incited to collect information.”

For 95% of his existence, mankind was dependent on daily food gathering: “Under these conditions his exceptional curiosity, his ingenuity, his facility in learning, his retentive memory, were put to work and tested.”

“Such searching and experimenting demanded plenty of motor activity; and this exploratory foraging, along with ritual and dance, must be given a fuller share of credit for man’s development.”

“What is missing from the usual petrified model is all the knowledge and art and equipment passed on by example from man’s early exploration of his environment.”

“Primitive man, less cultivated but perhaps more fully human, was content to visit the most fiendish tortures upon himself, and some of these mutations turned out to be far from futile.”

Humankind’s first machine could be the bow-and-arrow. Like nothing in nature, and drawing on the “primitive technics” of wood, stone and animal guts, this weapon is “a pure abstraction translated into physical form.”

The feathering of the bow-and-arrow’s arrow, which improved the accuracy, was “possible due to a purely magical identification of the arrow of the arrow with the wings of a living bird.”

“Partly through working stone, early man learned to respect the ‘reality principle’: the need for persistence and intense effort in order to achieve a distant reward.”

“Originally all the arts were sacred, since it was only to achieve communion with sacred forces that man would make the necessary efforts and sacrifices for esthetic perfection.”

Early cave paintings’ “exuberant display of sexuality,” showed a “deliberate effort, by means of symbolic images, to hold it and prolong its effects in the mind, instead of letting it be dissipated in immediate copulation.”

...As a result, “sexual intercourse, the earliest form of social communion and cooperation, was now directed and enriched by the mind.”

“Man alone dared play with fire: so he learned to court danger and to discipline his own fears.”

“An extra encouragement to sexual activity may have been imperative in a harsh climate whose long winters and forced hibernation ... depleted sexual interest and lowered sexual performance.” -- Mumford on a possible social benefit of cave painting porn.

“...horticulture—with its prizing of single fine specimens—preceded agriculture, with its emphasis on larger yields.”

Stored grain was potential energy; also the oldest form: also the oldest form of capital—witness pre-monetary commercial transactions in measures of grain.”

... “So when Neolithic people’s turned to work, one need hardly wonder that woman, with her patient, inexorable ways, took command.”

“Paleolithic males, if we judge by most surviving hunting peoples, had an aristocratic contempt of work in any form: they left such drudgery to their womenfolk.” ...

Industriousness as a new human trait first appeared in #neolithic culture: “the capacity for assiduous application to a single task, sometimes carried over years and generations.”

“Clay sickles in Palestine show that grain was being systematically garnered before it was deliberately planted.”

“What neither the miner nor the hunter had been able to accomplish, the woodman and the farmer, able to support larger numbers in a small area, actually achieved: An increasingly humanized habitat.”

“With command over words and images, no part of his world, inner or outer, animate or inanimate, lay beyond his reach or his mental grasp. Man had at last perfected the kind of artifact, the symbol, upon which his highly organized brain could work directly.”

Images and video of NYC experimental electronic music artist Kyosi folding the voice and words of Jo Annesta into her own shimmering music, H0L0, NYC