Science & Tech Quote by Don DeLillo

Technology doesn’t just upgrade life in DeLillo’s line; it makes life regress in strange, revealing ways. “Atavistic” is the key provocation: a word for ancestral throwbacks, traits reappearing after generations. In the face of machines that promise futurity, we don’t become sleekly modern. We get twitchy, tribal, superstitious. The future arrives, and our oldest software boots up.

The phrasing “in the face of” matters. Technology isn’t a neutral tool sitting politely on the desk; it’s an encounter, even a confrontation. DeLillo’s novels are crowded with systems that feel bigger than any single person - mass media, surveillance, corporate language, disaster-as-spectacle. Under that pressure, people search for older forms of meaning: ritual, paranoia, scapegoats, purity myths, the comfort of belonging to a side. High-tech environments produce low-tech behaviors: rumor spreads faster than facts; fear hardens into identity; private lives start performing for an imagined audience.

The subtext is less “technology is bad” than “technology is powerful enough to reorganize the human.” When your world is mediated by screens, metrics, and invisible networks, control becomes opaque, and the mind reaches for what it can grasp: symbols, talismans, enemies. It’s a neat DeLillo move - cool, compressed, slightly amused - to suggest that the more sophisticated our infrastructure, the more primitive our coping mechanisms look. Progress, he implies, doesn’t replace the past. It pressures the past into reappearing.