Science & Tech Quote by Alvin Toffler

Toffler’s line has the cool snap of a warning dressed up as a description. “Technology feeds on itself” is biological language smuggled into a discussion of machines: tech isn’t a toolbox we calmly open, it’s an organism with appetite, metabolism, and momentum. The repetition in the second sentence (“Technology makes more technology possible”) turns the idea into a loop, a kind of rhetorical flywheel. You can hear the inevitability in it: once a threshold is crossed, the system doesn’t merely progress; it compounds.

The intent is less to celebrate innovation than to reframe agency. Toffler was writing in the long shadow of postwar acceleration and into the early tremors of the information age, when computing, telecommunications, and automation were beginning to braid together. His broader project in Future Shock was to describe how societies get psychologically and politically outpaced by change. This quote isolates the engine: invention isn’t linear, it’s recursive. New tools don’t just solve problems; they create fresh capacities, which create fresh industries, which create fresh dependencies.

The subtext is that “choice” becomes harder to locate. If tech is self-feeding, restraint isn’t simply a matter of individual virtue or policy preference; it’s a fight against network effects, sunk costs, and competitive pressure. Even the neutral tone carries a mild cynicism: the system doesn’t need utopian motives to expand. It only needs possibility, and possibility, Toffler implies, is already enough.