Science & Tech Quote by Godfrey Reggio

Reggio’s line lands like a quiet indictment: the old story that technology is a neutral tool we pick up and put down is already obsolete. “Use” implies agency, distance, discretion. “Live” suggests habitat. He’s not arguing we’re addicted to gadgets so much as we’ve built a world where the gadget is the world - the environment that trains our attention, relationships, and sense of time.

As a director best known for Koyaanisqatsi and its hypnotic, wordless critique of modern velocity, Reggio’s intent isn’t to scold individual screen habits. It’s to relocate responsibility from personal willpower to cultural architecture. The subtext is ecological: technology isn’t a product; it’s a climate system. Once it becomes ambient, it stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like reality itself, the default setting you’re born into.

The phrasing also smuggles in a challenge to optimism. If we “use” technology, we can debate better rules, better design, better ethics. If we “live” it, then the ethical question gets harsher: what kind of life have we automated, and what have we made non-negotiable? Reggio’s work is steeped in the sense that speed and scale don’t just change what we do; they change what we are able to notice, value, or mourn.

It’s a minimalist sentence with maximal consequence: a reminder that the most powerful technologies disappear into normalcy, and that’s precisely when they do their deepest shaping.