Science & Tech Quote by Godfrey Reggio

Reggio’s line is a quiet provocation dressed up as a truism: tools are never neutral, and the “tool of now” is the one we pretend is just convenience. Coming from a director best known for wordless, image-driven indictments of modern speed and systems, the intent isn’t to offer a clever aphorism. It’s to reframe technology as governance by other means: a way of organizing attention, time, bodies, and desire without passing a single law.

“All tools have intrinsic politics” lands because it collapses the comforting distinction between device and ideology. A hammer suggests force, a highway suggests flow, a camera suggests surveillance and spectacle. Tools embed assumptions about what matters (efficiency, scale, extraction, control), and those assumptions get enforced not through debate but through design. Reggio’s subtext: politics doesn’t only happen in elections and parliaments; it happens in interfaces, supply chains, defaults, and the unchosen consequences of “innovation.”

“Technology is the tool of now” sharpens the claim into a warning about totalizing presence. Technology isn’t just another instrument in the shed; it’s the environment we live inside, the master tool that reshapes every other practice - work, intimacy, memory, even dissent. In the context of late-20th/early-21st century media saturation (the terrain of Koyaanisqatsi and its descendants), “now” also hints at a tyranny of the present: endless updates, perpetual urgency, fewer pauses where reflection might interrupt the machine.

The line works because it refuses the alibi of neutrality. If the tool is political, then opting out isn’t apathy; it’s still a choice within the system the tool already built.