Recognition
Lewis Mumford started off being enamored of cities. He felt affinity for the New York he grew up in during the early years of the twentieth century.
By the 1940s and ’50s he recognized that modern cities have grown too large.
In 1985 Ray Bradbury wrote, “I see nothing but good coming from computers. When they first appeared on the scene, people were saying, ‘Oh my God, I’m so afraid.’ I hate people like that — I call them the neo-Luddites” and: “In a sense, [computers] are simply books. Books are all over the place, and computers will be, too.”
Eventually he recognized that computers contribute to the modern problem of hyper-scale. By 2010 he resisted the conversion of his work into e-books, and said: “We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.”
