Science & Tech Quote by Simon Wiesenthal

Wiesenthal’s line lands with the quiet authority of someone who watched bureaucracy turn into a killing machine. He isn’t warning about “technology” in the abstract, the way anxious futurists do; he’s naming an accelerant. Hatred is old, intimate, often local. Technology is scalable, efficient, and indifferent. Put them together and you get something historically specific: prejudice upgraded into systems - trains that ran on time, punch cards and ledgers that made people legible as “units,” propaganda that moved faster than rumor, paperwork that laundered cruelty into routine.

The intent is bluntly preventive. As a Holocaust survivor and postwar activist who pursued Nazi perpetrators, Wiesenthal understood that atrocity rarely begins with monsters; it begins with administrative normalcy. The subtext is an accusation aimed at modern societies that treat tools as neutral and responsibility as optional. Technology doesn’t create hatred, but it can professionalize it, hiding moral choices behind process: “It’s just an order,” “it’s just an algorithm,” “it’s just data.”

Context matters here: Wiesenthal’s life work was built on the idea that memory is a civic technology too - archives, testimonies, documentation, names. That tension is the line’s sharpest edge. The same modern capacities that enable mass harm also enable accountability. His warning is less anti-tech than anti-complacency: when hatred finds a lever, progress stops being a promise and starts being a multiplier.