“Another time, then.” The older man sipped his tea and continued: “I think of the thousands of hours—the hundreds of thousands of hours—that went into designing these devices. I think of the hundreds of thousands of hours that go into ridding our secret places of them. The hours spent in designing the devices that must be designed to track and find the listening devices, the women and men employed to design the countermeasures, to sweep the interrogation rooms around the world. I think of the people who are employed to listen to all of the material gathered—overwhelmingly uninteresting, most of it, but here and there, something of use. All of these professions created. A philosopher of the twentieth century, Paul Virilio, said: ‘When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.’ I think often of that quote. Is it not so? Each new technology carries unexpected consequences.

“And each new technology changes us—the way we live. Even the way we dream. I often ask myself how people dreamed before films appeared. Certainly not in the same way. Once there was film, every dream became a movie. I think, in a way, it is technology that moves us, and not the other way around. We invent things blindly. We invent whatever we are capable of inventing. There are millions of us, determined to invent the next thing—whole industries devoted to bringing new technology into the world, without any thought given to these secondary effects that cannot even be imagined. When you invent the automobile, you invent the serial killer using his van as a mobile abattoir. When you invent the camera and the airplane, you end up with aerial surveillance. When you invent the drone, you should know that soon enough it will carry a bomb and be used in an assassination.

“Every one of these new things we build shapes our lives, carries consequences. But we can’t stop inventing, can we? We are compelled to invent. It is written into our DNA. Man is the technological animal. Invention is what has gotten us this far, made us the masters of this planet. But it is also what traps us. It is a compulsion. We cannot stop, no matter what the consequences.

“So you see, it is not human beings that are controlling technology—rather, it is the other way around. Technology has always been an unstoppable force, a creature evolving out of our need to invent—a creature feeding that need and creating the shapes and possibilities of our lives, shaping us to its purposes.”

Now the younger man raised his head and looked at him. “I wish you would say what you mean.”