Science & Tech Quote by David Cronenberg

Cronenberg doesn’t mean “tech helps us” in the sunny TED-talk sense. He means it the way his films mean it: technology is flesh with better marketing. Framing tech as an “extension of the human body” collapses the comforting boundary between tool and self, making the smartphone less like a gadget you carry and more like a prosthetic you forget you’re wearing until it’s taken away. The line is deliberately clinical, almost neutral, which is part of the menace. If tech is bodily, then it’s not optional; it’s intimate, habit-forming, and capable of infection.

The subtext is classic Cronenberg: anxiety about where agency lives when our desires are routed through machines. An “extension” sounds empowering, but it also implies dependence and vulnerability. Bodies break, mutate, betray us; so do the systems we graft onto them. In Videodrome, eXistenZ, and Crash, the point isn’t that technology dehumanizes us from the outside. It eroticizes us, rewires us, gives our impulses new hardware. The horror comes from recognition: you don’t need a sci-fi apocalypse for this to be true. The body has always been a platform, and culture has always been a kind of interface.

Context matters: Cronenberg is a director whose signature is “body horror,” but his real subject is control - who gets to design the extensions, who profits from them, and what parts of us they amplify. The quote works because it’s both obvious and unsettling. Once you accept it, you start asking a more uncomfortable question: if the technology is part of the body, whose body is it becoming?