Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it

 --- Margaret Heffernan, perhaps in The Myth of Inevitability, BBC audio, Oct 2019, via LM Sacasas in Resistance Is Futile: The Myth of Tech Inevitability, The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 7

Either to tell a story or to make a tool is to adopt an imaginary position outside immediate sensory experience

 --- David E Nye, quoted by LM Sacasas in Resistance Is Futile: The Myth of Tech Inevitability, The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 7

Context via Sacasas

Composing a narrative and using a tool are not identical processes, but they have affinities . . . Each requires the imagination of altered circumstances, and in each case beings must see themselves to be living in time. Making a tool immediately implies a succession of events in which one exercises some control over outcomes. Either to tell a story or to make a tool is to adopt an imaginary position outside immediate sensory experience. In each case, one imagines how present circumstances might be made different.

There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.

 --- Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, according to goodreads