Kirkpatrick Sale

Human-scale technology is not some dream or illusion: it exists. And that makes the present age unique. We now know that it is possible to achieve a technology for a wide range of human actions and still be kept within human dimensions and human control, without doing violence to the planet’s resources or ecosystems.

It is quite ironic: only a decade or so after the idea of the United States as an imperial power came to be accepted by both right and left, and people were actually able to talk openly about an American empire, it is showing multiple signs of its inability to continue.