Vaclav Havel:
> Technology — that child of modern science, which in turn is a child of > modern metaphysics — is out of humanity's control, has ceased to serve > us, has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in the preparation > of our own destruction. And humanity can find no way out: we have no > idea and no faith, and even less do we have a political conception to > help us bring things back under human control. We look on helplessly > as that coldly functioning machine we have created inevitably engulfs > us, tearing us away from our natural affiliations (for instance, from > our habitat in the widest sense of that word, including our habitat in > the biosphere) just as it removes us from the experience of Being and > casts us into the world of "existences." This situation has already > been described from many different angles and many individuals and > social groups have sought, often painfully, to find ways out of it > (for instance, through oriental thought or by forming communes). The > only social, or rather political, attempt to do something about it > that contains the necessary element of universality (responsibility to > and for the whole) is the desperate and, given the turmoil the world > is in, fading voice of the ecological movement, and even there the > attempt is limited to a particular notion of how to use technology to > oppose the dictatorship of technology.
"The Power of the Powerless," XX, Paul Wilson tr. The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, with an Introduction by Steven Lukes (London: Hutchinson, 1985). On-line at http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/archive/files/havel-power-of-the-powerless_be62e5917d.pdf, accessed 20111218. See also http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/index.php?sec=2&id=5&setln=2