Player Piano- quote

"Anybody that competes with a slave becomes a slave" (281).

I found this quote to be a repetitive theme throughout the novel, Player Piano. Throughout the entire novel, people were constantly competing against themselves and against machines, essentially becoming slaves to this race against time. People were competing with machines for their jobs, for their entire way of life. In many cases people were inventing machines which could do their jobs, and since machines could do them faster and more efficiently, the machines quickly replaced the people who invented them.

Also, the people were basically slaves to the machines, constantly fixing, inventing, and upgrading them so that they had the newest and most efficient models. The people's main focus was the care and upkeep of the machines, causing them to lose all connections to how life used to be and enslaving them to the 'machine race'. The machines can also be considered slaves because they cannot think for themselves; they just do as they are programmed and are switched out once they are not running up to par.

Paul becomes a slave to showing people that they can live without machines in their lives. He is constantly competing against time to try and convince people that it is not to late to turn back and refuse this life controlled by machines. Paul loses his wife and his entire way of life to this quest, much like how slaves lost their families and possessions when they were taken. Paul becomes a slave to humanity, while most other people have become slaves to machinery. Either way, they are both competing against something, and are slaves in doing so.