Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …
Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 210
Stallman's Law (2012) https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallmans-law.html <br class="br">2010s <br class="br">Variant: While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users.
Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …
Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 210
Adolf A. Berle (1895–1971) American diplomat
Source: The Modern Corporation and Private Property. 1932/1967, p. 357 (1967, p. 313)
Harvey S. Rosen (1949) American economist
Source: Public Finance - International Edition - Sixth Edition, Chapter 17, The Corporation Tax, p. 399
Joel Bakan (1959) Canadian writer, musician, filmmaker and legal scholar
Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 6, Reckoning, p. 139
Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) American theoretical physicist and professor of physics
Science and the Common Understanding (1953)
“Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host
Profiles of the Future (revised edition, 1973)
On Clarke's Laws
Source: Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry Into the Limits of the Possible
Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project
1990s, Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source" (1998)
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) author and historian
Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology (1991): "American Ideology" http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/AmericanIdeology_DI.html <br class="br">Context: If those in charge of our society — politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television — can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.
Bob Black book The Abolition of Work
The Abolition of Work (1985)
Context: I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimun definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it's done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or "communist," work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.
Usually—and this is even more true in "communist" than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee — work is employment, i. e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or Nicaragua or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions — Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey — temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millennia, the payment of taxes (ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.