"I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement"
About this Quote
Eno’s tech optimism lands with a quiet provocation: what if the machine isn’t the enemy of “real” music, but the toy that makes real music possible? Coming from a musician who helped define ambient and studio-as-instrument thinking, the line isn’t nerd-bragging so much as a worldview. He frames technology as play - “fun and amusement” - and that choice of language matters. Play is permission. It suggests low stakes, curiosity, iterative tinkering: the exact conditions under which accidents become aesthetic breakthroughs.
The subtext is a rebuttal to a familiar cultural panic. Plenty of people meet machines with suspicion, imagining replacement, coldness, control. Eno flips that affective script: the threat isn’t in the circuitry; it’s in our social anxieties. By contrasting “machines in general” with “other people,” he hints at why gear can feel safer than human relationships: machines are predictable collaborators. They don’t judge your half-formed ideas. They respond, and you respond back. That feedback loop is basically a studio.
Contextually, this is the Eno project in miniature: treating tools as partners, systems as co-authors. From tape loops to generative music, he’s long argued that creativity isn’t a lightning bolt from the self; it’s a set of conditions you build. The intent, then, is not to praise gadgets but to normalize an experimental posture toward them. In Eno’s hands, the machine is less a symbol of modern alienation than a route out of it - a way to make wonder operational.
The subtext is a rebuttal to a familiar cultural panic. Plenty of people meet machines with suspicion, imagining replacement, coldness, control. Eno flips that affective script: the threat isn’t in the circuitry; it’s in our social anxieties. By contrasting “machines in general” with “other people,” he hints at why gear can feel safer than human relationships: machines are predictable collaborators. They don’t judge your half-formed ideas. They respond, and you respond back. That feedback loop is basically a studio.
Contextually, this is the Eno project in miniature: treating tools as partners, systems as co-authors. From tape loops to generative music, he’s long argued that creativity isn’t a lightning bolt from the self; it’s a set of conditions you build. The intent, then, is not to praise gadgets but to normalize an experimental posture toward them. In Eno’s hands, the machine is less a symbol of modern alienation than a route out of it - a way to make wonder operational.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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