Time & Perspective Quote by Godfrey Reggio

Reggio’s warning lands less like a scold than a lament: the tragedy isn’t that technology exists, it’s that we’ve stopped noticing what it’s doing to us. His phrasing is tellingly tactile. “Adopted tools” sounds domestic, even tender, as if gadgets were pets or children brought into the home. Then the line pivots: the “manner” of adoption matters, and we’re sleepwalking through it. That’s the director’s eye at work - not obsessed with the tool, but with the choreography around it: the habits, reflexes, and social rituals that quietly harden into “normal.”

The subtext is identity by accretion. Tools begin as extensions (a camera, a car, a phone) and end as environments. Once the tool is everywhere, opting out stops feeling like a choice; it becomes a kind of exile. “Those tools have become who we are” isn’t a metaphor meant to flatter innovation. It’s a diagnosis of substitution: we outsource memory to devices, attention to feeds, navigation to GPS, and then mistake the resulting dependency for evolution. The tragedy is self-erasure dressed up as convenience.

Context matters here: Reggio’s films (especially Koyaanisqatsi) were built on wordless montage, a style that treats modernity as something you feel in your nervous system before you can argue about it. This quote carries that same cinematic logic. He’s not asking for better apps; he’s asking for awareness - because without it, the tools don’t just serve our lives. They script them.