Even the most abstract categories, in spite of their validity for all epochs—because of their abstract nature—are yet in the precise terms of this abstraction themselves as much the product of historical conditions and possess their full validity only in respect of and within these conditions.

Karl Marx, Grundrisse ([1857] 1983, 390)

The Québec film-maker, Jean-Claude Labrecque, once said of the threat of cultural obliteration posed by new technologies of communication: “It’s like snow; it keeps falling and all you can do is go on shoveling.” Technology as snow, or maybe as a nuclear winter; that’s the Canadian, and by extension, world situation now.

Arthur Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind (1984, 129)

The malicious horizon made us the essential thinkers of technology.

Dionne Brand, No Language Is Neutral (1990, 23)