"There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it"
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Progress is supposed to feel like relief. DeLillo insists it often lands as dread.
The line pivots on a nasty paradox: the more sophisticated our machines become, the more ancient our emotional circuitry lights up. “Advances” carries the glow of inevitability and improvement, the language of press releases and futurists. Then DeLillo yanks the mood backward with “primitive fear,” a phrase that refuses to flatter the modern self-image. It suggests that beneath our interfaces and optimizations we’re still animals scanning the dark for predators, except the predator is now abstract: systems too complex to understand, risks too dispersed to locate, power too invisible to confront.
That’s the subtextual move DeLillo loves. Technology isn’t just a tool; it’s an atmosphere that reorganizes perception. When you can’t see how decisions are made (by networks, algorithms, institutions), you don’t experience rational concern so much as superstition-grade anxiety. Fear becomes “primitive” not because the threats are fake, but because they’re cognitively ungraspable. The mind drops back to older patterns: suspicion, omen-reading, a need for scapegoats.
Contextually, this tracks with DeLillo’s career-long focus on how mass media, surveillance, catastrophe, and consumer tech don’t simply inform us; they narrate reality for us. Think of the late-20th-century arc from nuclear dread to televised disaster to digital omnipresence: each breakthrough promises control while quietly expanding the range of what can go wrong. DeLillo’s intent is not to romanticize the premodern but to puncture the techno-utopian story. He’s warning that innovation doesn’t abolish fear; it updates it, gives it better distribution, higher resolution, and fewer exits.
The line pivots on a nasty paradox: the more sophisticated our machines become, the more ancient our emotional circuitry lights up. “Advances” carries the glow of inevitability and improvement, the language of press releases and futurists. Then DeLillo yanks the mood backward with “primitive fear,” a phrase that refuses to flatter the modern self-image. It suggests that beneath our interfaces and optimizations we’re still animals scanning the dark for predators, except the predator is now abstract: systems too complex to understand, risks too dispersed to locate, power too invisible to confront.
That’s the subtextual move DeLillo loves. Technology isn’t just a tool; it’s an atmosphere that reorganizes perception. When you can’t see how decisions are made (by networks, algorithms, institutions), you don’t experience rational concern so much as superstition-grade anxiety. Fear becomes “primitive” not because the threats are fake, but because they’re cognitively ungraspable. The mind drops back to older patterns: suspicion, omen-reading, a need for scapegoats.
Contextually, this tracks with DeLillo’s career-long focus on how mass media, surveillance, catastrophe, and consumer tech don’t simply inform us; they narrate reality for us. Think of the late-20th-century arc from nuclear dread to televised disaster to digital omnipresence: each breakthrough promises control while quietly expanding the range of what can go wrong. DeLillo’s intent is not to romanticize the premodern but to puncture the techno-utopian story. He’s warning that innovation doesn’t abolish fear; it updates it, gives it better distribution, higher resolution, and fewer exits.
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| Topic | Technology |
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