Politicked Off

What did people say in 1498? Well, they said only, “How wonderful it is to have all these new books.” Those same people were engaged in turning the known world inside out, but they didn’t for a minute see what they were doing.

And what are people saying in 1998? Well, we’ve watched technology turning us inside out for about 200 years now. So we expect the computer to change us. But technology has never been predictable. We always miss the point. Visionaries looked at transportation in 1948 and predicted we’d have a helicopter in every garage by 1960. They looked at the new computers in 1960 and predicted that one big mother computer would organize the world by 1980. We never get the future right.

Today, visionaries fall oddly quiet while the rest us of run about saying Gee Whiz, look at how much information our children can access. The real changes that the computer is bringing about are changes in the way we see reality. And we do not yet have an adult generation that’s known the computer from the cradle. All of us see the computer against the background of the not-computer. All of us typed before we word-processed. All of us learned the algorithms of arithmetic before we used hand calculators. All of us see the PC against the backdrop of a world without it. What we cannot see at all is how a mind will work when it’s never known anything but the PC.

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