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In discussing the "electronic revolution" in publishing that many claim is now going on, savants often slide into the techno- determinism most cleverly formulated by Herbert Marshall McCluhan and put on the robes of old testament prophets. There are serious dangers in such stances. I would like to address some of these problems from an historical perspective, and make a pedestrian proposal that might seem outrageous to some readers familiar with the discussion of new technologies.
In looking at the history of communications, I will have to deal quickly with long periods of time. This has its uses, but the great diversity of the large numbers of individuals involved should not be forgotten in the process, as is common in contemporary "media" discussion. This cannot be stressed too much: none of these comments has any meaning if divorced from the people involved. When discussing the advent of printing, we must bear in mind the lives not only of scholar-printers like Aldus or Estienne but also the street toughs employed by them to cut punches because of their skill with knives. When speaking of education, we must remember that teachers have run a wide gamut from sadists who liked to see the backs of unruly children bleed to sincerely dedicated people who enthusiastically and selflessly devoted themselves to bettering the lives of their students, often for wretched pay if any at all. When speaking of developments in paper making, we must not lose sight of those who lived their lives in the stench of the mill, resenting every tedious working day, or those who added to the process in small, slow, and anonymous increments, spending many sleepless nights trying to figure out how pulp could be better refined or how drying screens could be improved. When speaking of the present moment in the history of communication, we negate the discussion if we do not consider the many diverse skills and intentions of a mind boggling number of people who deserve our respect, whatever our differences in belief and evaluation -- even if this moment should prove a dead end or if its results should be other than what we expect or want.
Several lines of electronic publishing are now in the works, and may partially fulfill the claims made by technophiles for electronic books of the future. You can get a lot of text on a CD-ROM, and if we get past the puerile "Great Books" approach of "Library of the Future", it should be feasible to produce tailored CDs that could give nearly anyone of moderate means the equivalent of a public library. If the obscenity of censorship can be prevented, the equivalent of immense libraries on CD-ROM wouldn't be necessary: many libraries could put their public domain works on-line, and arrangements could be made to digitize a great deal of work under current copyright. Some universities are already doing this. Organizations such as Project Guttenberg digitize standard classics and make them available in plain ASCII format, a language that can be read by almost all computers. Spunk Press has been making Anarchist texts available on-line for several years. Spunk's library now contains some 1400 items. Spunk's URL is:
http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/people/Jack.Jansen/spunk/Spunk_Home.html
You can find my Light and Dust archive of contemporary poetry, fiction, and criticism at the following URL:
http://www.thing.net/~grist
Grist On-Line includes a number of other web publishers, hosted by John Fowler. One line of prophecy combines hardware and files: reading devices about one by five by eight inches could be manufactured easily and inexpensively. Instead of turning pages, the reader would go from screen to screen by scrolling a knob at the side. Copy for these readers could be sent by modem and down-loaded into the readers easily. This could significantly reduce production and distribution costs. Such a reader could be used in virtually any situation: you could read from it in your favorite chair, at your desk or workstation, in bed, on a bus or train, in the bathtub, outdoors in the shade of a tree or on your front porch. Theoretically, the amount and range of material available could be virtually infinite. In some instances, it might be desirable to give the person reading from such a device the option of changing type face or point size -- this could be a great benefit for people with visual impairments or some kinds of dyslexia.
Along with the prophets who wax eloquent on the advantages of electronic publishing, there is also a growing chorus of prophets decrying the advent of electronic publishing. Perhaps the strongest line of argument from this group points out the danger of the supplier of texts becoming a stifling and extortionary monopoly in total control of transmitted material. Whether under private or government control matters little: as a negation of free speech and an instrument of propaganda, this would be a free reader's worst nightmare come true.
This line of prophecy also includes those who fear that electronic publishing will bring about the end of printed books, thus reducing the "great accomplishments of western civilization" to the standardized barbarity of lights blink in a plastic box. My favorite statement along these lines came from the novelist Paul Metcalf, who initially expressed reservations about being included in the Light and Dust archive. Among the usual objections, the following struck me as irrefutable: Paul said that every computer he'd ever seen looked like it came from Toys-R-Us, an enormous toy store chain in the U.S.. In many ways he's right -- computers tend to look like video game sets, and even the most serious programs they run often resemble such games.
It would be nice -- perhaps even easy to resolve -- if the problems of new media leant themselves to simple yes/no, positive/negative dichotomies. They don't. And, perhaps more importantly, if they are like other changes in communication, their main functions in the long run will not be immediately apparent. To understand the problem better, let's take a step back and look at the problem in a larger context. Dullness and standardization have been a long time coming, and only custom, sales technique, and context prevent us from seeing most books as Toys-R-Us items at the present time. Bookstore chains like Waldens, Daltons, and Borders could just as well be called Books-R-Us. It's taken quite a bit of preparation to get us ready for Books-R-Us, much of it institutional, and much of it in the name of education, culture, child rearing, and progress.
The main course of writing in western civilization has been towards ease of assimilation. Although most writers on the subject act as cheerleaders for this movement, each step has involved loss of one sort or another. Apparently the largest transition was from signs with intrinsic pictorial and symbolic value to characters that recorded speech. We can see some of the loss involved in this transition if we compare the Roman alphabet with the Chinese writing system. Although a European language such as Latin may be more flexible and easier to learn, there are expressive potentials in the graphic and etymological components of written Chinese that simply don't exist in the Roman alphabet.
The first phonetic scripts represented consonant phonemes only; a giant step came with additional symbols to represent vowels. The clarity and grace of the Roman alphabet as it existed by the fourth century A.D. apparently contributed to the ability of at least a few people to read silently. Roman political structure also permitted publishing in something like the modern sense of the word. Though the Romans had no printing presses, they did control plantations in Egypt where slaves grew papyrus plants; another class of slaves made papyrus sheets; and another transcribed books dictated to them in large sweatshops. Separating words from each other by putting spaces between them, combining majuscules and minuscules to create the distinction between what we now call (following later printing practices) upper and lower case letters, the addition and diversification of punctuation took place slowly over many centuries. These developments contributed more to the possibility of printing from moveable types than any other factor.
Earlier writing systems required close cooperation between student and teacher, and between mature reader and community. Reading was not a solitary practice, nor was it silent. It was a form of social behavior that involved not only a personally transmitted tradition but also discussion and communal use. Moving away from this made both learning to read and reading itself easier, and contributed to a greater sense of individuality for the reader. Although breaking ties of authority and group restraint marked a real advance, the accompanying loss of community and cooperation should not be underestimated. As Plato, who more or less invented prose as an art instead of a simple expedient, observed, one of the costs of basic literacy was a loss in memory. This can still be seen in parts of the world where "pre-literate" people look askance at anthropologists, missionaries, etc. who can't remember events precisely and conversations verbatim for very long.
Advances in legibility made it easier for people to learn how to read, and by the mid 14th century, literacy rates were higher than they had been since the days of the Roman Empire, probably exceeding those of the classic Roman world. From a contemporary point of view, it's hard to see any loss in that. The increase in the number of people who could read contributed to the success of movable type: to put it in modern terms, an industry of this sort needs a fair number of consumers to amortize production costs and allow an acceptable profit margin. People writing on the revolution in communication of the mid 15th century stress the mechanics of invention because it's easy to do, and in doing so they can create semi-mythic heroes like Guttenberg, yet the center of the story is the social and economic dynamics that made print viable. The rise of a middle class that could afford books and wanted the prestige associated with them, and strangely subversive religious groups such as the Brothers of the Common Life, actively engaged in teaching reading to all social strata, created a strong push toward more legible writing and a larger output of books. The same applies to most technological advances. If Charlemagne could have commissioned a telephone, what could he have done with it? He could not have set up a hotline to Haroon al Rashid without the support of hundreds of thousands of telephone users and thousands of workers who could set up and operate telephone networks.
Since the 15th century, refinements have continued along similar lines. By the 16th century, savants in England and France were clamoring for standardized orthography. Since English and French are essentially creoles, spelling was considerably more confusing than for languages such as Italian that followed a different evolutionary path. This reform went over somewhat better in France than in England, and since it was conducted in part by scholar- printer-publishers, it is one of the reasons why French continues to use diacritical markings. But serious standardization had to wait for ideological and technical changes before becoming absolute. After the U.S war for independence, the puritan element in the U.S. found an outlet for its need to control every detail of life in figures like Noah Webster, who equated standardization with moral probity, and saw correct spelling as next to Godliness. The need to repress unruliness of any sort runs under the surface of Webster's spelling bees and related activities, and forms part of the basis for the regimentation, and hence cost efficiency, of mass education. This kind of regimentation and quashing of individuality played a crucial role in creating the industrial workforce of 19th century America. The task of breaking the spirits of agrarian workers so they could make efficient factory drones had to come in the guise of education, and, since it was aimed at children, required an element of play. The same system of imbedding standardization in the psyches of children also helped make them good consumers, willing to accept standardized products, putting aside the long tradition of bargaining for something better in daily transactions. It's hard to argue against mass education, but since one of its major advance evolved as an adjunct to wage slavery, it's also hard to miss the losses involved -- and hard not to wish it had been brought about in a better way.
Book production went through several related stages of development. For the most part, renaissance printers worked their type to the point of near illegibility. This and the rough finishes of the papers they used required a hefty punch in impression. As markets expanded, consumer purchasing power increased, and smoother printing surfaces became more readily available, printers strove for a greater evenness of impression and inking. Binders worked towards simpler and quicker methods. Since books could be mass produced, they didn't have to last long: this took a great deal of strain off the book binders as it took the strain off of the bindings of individual books.
As books became standardized, it became possible for some people to read silently more quickly than they could speak. This capability has been systematized and codified in the 20th century as speed reading. Taught nearly everywhere, to children and adults alike, this ability can allow an adept to read more in a week than Shakespeare read in his lifetime. When the 20th century was still relatively young, Beatrice Warde published her most important essay "The Crystal Goblet." This work stands with such classics as Trithemius's De Laude Scriptorum as a landmark in the history of commentary on book making and reading. In it she argued that type and all other aspects of book production should be "transparent." Using the analogy of a drinking glass, she maintained that someone who appreciates wine would prefer a glass that showed and delivered the wine to its fullest advantage, without any hindrance or distraction from ornament or irregularity. She extended the metaphor in several ways: the stem of the glass, for instance, was analogous to the margins of a printed page: both stem and margins provide handles so the fingers of the drinker or reader don't cover the real prize. According to Ms. Warde, nothing should come between the reader and the words and ideas of the author. These are noble sentiments, and many elegant books have been produced by people who have taken Ms. Warde seriously, almost as Gospel. Unfortunately, the craftspeople who have followed Ms. Warde have been a tiny minority of book producers. The way things have worked out in practice has gone in a different direction, not toward craftsmanly restraint and selfless devotion to literature, but toward homogenized banality, and the worst breach of transparency possible: the obscuring of text under the illusion of transparency.
Many who argue against electronic publishing claim that computers will turn us into data processors instead of readers. That has already happened. Nearly all of the developments that have moved writing toward greater legibility have moved it farther away from speech, something that exists in what the producers of audio recordings call "real-time," and toward a completely cerebral rate of assimilation. At the same time, these developments have moved writing away from expressive forms of visualization. Standardized appearance of text has had the odd effect of making visual innovations in design all look alike because we have become fixated on the illusion of transparency. In effect, we were turning ourselves into data processors long before Turing started tinkering with his computing devices. Without that transformation, computers of the modern type probably could not have been made.
For many purposes, reading as data assimilation has its advantages. Given the volume of information with which the contemporary world seems to overwhelm us, the ability to assimilate a large volume of data may aid many people in making crucial decisions. If you're going downriver in a boat, you can only steer if you're moving faster than the current of the water. Then again, if you are required to make decisions before you've thought them through or even had time to check your basic instincts, you're probably going to make a lot of serious mistakes.
For most of what we think of as literature, and for the book as an art form, this development has been a disaster. Nowhere is this more evident than in poetry. Traditionally, poetry, like its near relative music, is an art based in time. When you start distorting time in poetry, you destroy it. To clarify this, let's use recordings of music as an example. If you play a 33 1/3 rpm record at 45 rpm, you will not only change the tempo, you'll also change the pitch. This applies equally to contemporary heavy metal rock and its 19th century predecessor, the operas of Wagner and Verdi; the music of John Coltrane and his 18th century antecedent, Johann Sebastian Bach. Changes in perception of time aided by reading rates causes serious problems in all areas of contemporary life, from the ability to handle anticipation to attention spans to the ability to make realistic plans and projections. With the advent of television came a quantum leap in distortion of perceptions of time. On one level, it brought about a greater desire for acquiring goods immediately, which in turn encouraged purchases on credit, in some instances reinstating perpetual cycles of debt. On another level, the time slots allotted for programs brought the mechanical schedule of the factory into peoples daily lives. Watching television also prepared people for using computers, which resemble televisions with keyboards.
Perhaps no other change in the history of literacy has developed as quickly as the move to computer technology. It's nature would be hard to describe at this point, as its direction is still uncertain. It will probably take a long time for it to be possible to chart the gains and losses of the last decade, and changes will probably continue at an accelerating rate in the future. Even a simple list of pros and cons is a strange sort of seesaw of arguments.
For a minority (including me), computer technology has allowed people to work at home, setting their own schedules and reintegrating work with the rest of their lives. Many of these people can find and exploit niches in the economy that can't be handled profitably by larger corporations, and the volume of work they can turn out with the new technology gives them greater earning power than they could hope for under other circumstances. Computer usage gives many handicapped people who would otherwise be virtually unemployable the ability to earn a decent living. An example of this is the husband of a colleague of mine. He is blind, yet he works as a computer programmer. Instead of reading from a monitor, he reads from a pad over rods that produce Braille characters. My colleague first met him at a computer users' group, which suggests that computers need not be as isolating as many claim. There's no way that we can rightfully disparage the benefits to many handicapped people that computers have brought about.
But at this time, data feeds on data, and the techno-industrial complex that universal literacy made possible needs large numbers of people to gather, enter, transfer, and otherwise manipulate data. In the industrial world this has lead to computerized sweatshops that seem little better than those of the 19th century. In the U.S., much of this corpse of data workers are "temps," people employed on a temporary basis at a pay scale below minimum wage, with no health, retirement, or other benefits. People in these data pools often develop job-related health problems that limit the number of years they can work. With union formation difficult if not impossible for temps, this makes them disposable workers. Often their rate of input is monitored through the computer systems on which they work, and they are docked or fired if they don't maintain a predetermined speed. In many instances, simple amenities such as coffee breaks, time to go to the bathroom, the keeping of personal items such as family pictures at workstations are strictly prohibited.
In time, the functions of many of these workers could be taken over by more sophisticated computers. Combining computers with robotics has already taken over some services and types of industrial production, including unhealthy jobs in both data processing and in computer chip manufacture. Ideally, this could mean a lot less drudgery for everyone. But this is simply another form of one of the old dilemmas of capitalism: without some means of distributing the advantage of reduced labor, it would simply mean the impoverishment of larger numbers of people.
Computers linked to the internet can work wonders in education, making vast resources available to schools with minuscule budgets, and making home schooling more practical. Students can learn at their own pace, and there are few more effective teaching methods than repeatedly correcting your own mistakes, as you do with a computer. The video game aspect of computers finds one of its most salutary uses among children. Those with learning disabilities, minor to major, can often overcome them or learn coping skills without social stigma or personal ridicule from teachers or other students. Through the net, many students can reach beyond the prejudices and limitations of their parents and teachers. Perhaps the fear of this is a major, though unspoken and perhaps unrealized, motive in the drive for censorship in the U.S. To quote Barlow, "You are terrified of your own children because they are natives in a country where you will always be immigrants."
At the same time, a lot of what can be learned from computers has to do with the manipulation of information, not the conduct of life in the world. Many human teachers don't go for more than information transfer as is, but still computers can only make a bad situation worse. Data manipulation in favor of action and involvement in a larger context could act as a greater force in pacification and control of people than any programming that might be run in a computer. The earlier people become used to data in favor of experience, the more malleable they may become. If too much reliance is placed on computers, it can encourage solipsism and delusions of power or invulnerability. Computer dependency may hamper or eliminate social relations with teachers and other children, producing the kind of nerds that are at present more readily found in comics than in the world. Although the video game aspect of computers can make some sorts of learning fun, and hence encourage the students, it can also strongly deter students from learning that which is difficult, that which is *not* fun. Most of the most important things a child can learn are not fun and cannot be made so. If all a child learns is how to move little images around on a screen, he becomes little more than one of those little images himself. Instead of the computer being an extension of the brain, as the McCluhanites would put it, the child becomes an accessory or, in computer sales terms, a "peripheral" of the software.
There is an interesting parallel between software and Noah Webster's spelling bees. The first generation of post-mainframe software was based completely on text -- no images, no mice or other selecting or drawing devices. What you saw on the screen was no more than the letters you could type on a standard keyboard. This was largely supplanted within a few years by mouse operated graphic interfaces. In some instances, you can run elaborate programs without using a keyboard at all. These interfaces make computer use easier and more fun for many people. These cheerful interfaces made a quantum leap in the video game aspect of computing: no matter what task you're performing, you're always moving little figures around, while the computer responds with other images, many of them animated. This can take some of the strain off of work and make it more pleasant. It's interesting to note how computer magazines increased enormously in response to proliferating "user friendly" software. It's hard to find a newsstand in the U.S. today that doesn't carry at least a dozen computer magazines. Surely no other machinery has become a national hobby or sport the way computers have. When changes in computing occur at a dizzying rate, the video game component may be necessary for most users to learn new programs quickly enough to keep up with the demands placed on them as computers take over more functions. At the same time, the video game can encourage the user, particularly the younger user, to see work and life as a video game, and find it more difficult to cope with anything that doesn't work the same way. On the most sinister level, it may be no accident that the Gulf War, presented by U.S. television as a video game, occurred during the period when graphic interfaces were generating large scale euphoria.
Another interesting parallel to graphic interfaces is the pre- columbian writing systems of central Mexico. This area was a sort of bottleneck for the indigenous peoples of the Americas in their patterns of migration and settlement. Here many distinct groups with different languages came together, lived in close proximity to each other, and often produced cultural, linguistic, and physiological hybrids. The writing systems of this area (as distinct from the Mayan systems to the south) were iconographic -- that is, they were based on common icons instead of spoken languages, so that people who spoke different languages could read them. The advantages of this for a densely packed, heterogeneous population are obvious. The same may be partially the case for icon based software in the increasingly interdependent yet linguistically disparate world of today. In addition to providing a crude common language, a system of icons associated with words could more or less effortlessly work toward the creation or acquisition of the rudiments of a universal spoken language.
The internet's ability to deliver mail around the world, often in a matter of seconds, creates opportunities of all sorts. On one level, I have been able to hold what amounts to conversations with people in Europe and Asia by passing e-notes back and forth. On another level, the speed of e- mail could allow coordinated action on a global scale. This could have endless benefits for quickly mobilizing and implementing political action. If a global federation of unions arose to meet the problems of international capitalism, this speed of communication would be absolutely essential. It already has been in some environmental and human rights situations. On the other hand, if people use the net primarily for frivolous purposes, it becomes a good way of keeping large numbers of people from taking any kind of meaningful action on anything even fixing the plumbing in their homes.
The large number of diverse social and political organizations present on the net surprises many people in the political mainstream. It should not: the net didn't create that diversity, it simply allowed it to manifest itself in a way that older media have not. It's possible that exposure to alternatives could bring about changes in the attitudes of people inured to a painfully narrow spectrum. At the same time, it could help break down some of the insularity of people outside the sphere of the centrists and lead to cooperation and reorientation of activists of all sorts. On the other hand, the fear of such possibilities could lead to paranoia and repression on the part of people in power, accompanied not only by arrests, deportations, etc. but also attempts to use the net as a tool for thought control.
"Would that all God's children were prophets" wrote William Blake two centuries ago. In a sense, the proliferation of web sites could move toward something like Blake's vision, with everyone who had something to say in a position to be their own publisher, their own prophet. This seems to open up possibilities for freedom of expression almost beyond belief for the web, as long as it remains free and uncensored. Once it becomes censored, it becomes at least as slanted, as biased, and as stifling as the media we already have. A number of companies and organizations, under the guise of everything from protecting children to fighting sexism, are now engaged in a pitched battle to disembowel the internet, and turn it into nothing more than a means of peddling consumer trash. If this succeeds, the only reasonable response to the success of the censors would be to sign off the net completely and leave it to run as the lowest sewer of capitalism, or be prepared to devote all your energy, resources, and possibly your life to fighting the censors, to providing the grounds for all to be prophets instead of extending the capacity to turn all God's children into nothing more than corporate profits. The internet's world wide web has the capacity to tailor every user's library to his or her needs, something never before possible. On the other hand, the web's potential for fragmentation has the potential for completely destroying all sense of context and meaningful interrelation. If this destruction of context became a way of thinking 'off' the web, in other areas of life, it could easily become the new technology's most completely, albeit most subtly, destructive characteristic.
This seesawing of pros and cons could be extended considerably. I've just mentioned a few possibilities that seem important to me. I'm sure other contributors will add more, and you can find a wide proliferation of them in any computer magazine, or, for that matter, nearly any newspaper. Instead of pursuing them further, I'd like to make the pedestrian proposal I mentioned at the beginning of this article. It's something that doesn't sound like much in regard to the way we tend to see changes of the past. Okay here it is: accept the technology provisionally and try to humanize it. Don't accept it uncritically, don't be afraid to talk back to those who are guided solely by McCluhanite determinism, and don't be afraid to go against the grain. This of course does not mean making the new media conform to the old or ignoring the many new positive possibilities that new media may present us with that we did not anticipate. Many enthusiasts at the present time argue that you are doing something wrong if you do not do what is "appropriate to the medium." It would be more appropriate at times when the new technologies don't work for us to think in terms of "abusing the medium before it abuses us." An open secret that most polemicist seem to have missed or ignored in media discussion is that in the past whole armies of people have humanized technology, usually by working precisely counter to the grain, in small and usually anonymous increments.
The contemporary world would be a much more depraved and hellish place had they not done so. Now it is our turn. We seem to have many resources with which to humanize technology unavailable to people in the past.
One of the strongest deterrents to this kind of response is the futility of dramatic gestures. There have been a number of people who give themselves Luddite names, sometimes even calling themselves Luddites, who write books and pull media stunts in protest against "new technology." Presumably none of them has ever seen or even considered the house-sized perfecting presses used to print their books, nor would they consider relevant the improved worker safety in the printing industry in the U.S. during recent years, which has included improved machinery along with more intelligent use. But the thing that strikes me as strangest about these charlatans is their fondness for smashing computers with sledge hammers in front of tv cameras. If they detest technology so much, why are they so enamored of television? Perhaps because tv, unlike a computer, is a passive medium? Whatever the case, stunts of this sort can do nothing to change the course of computer development. If we step back a little, we can see ways in which technologies could have been humanized by smaller steps taken by individuals and associations. In a time when everyone from teachers to secretaries had more clout than they do now, if there had been a movement to replace the standard QWERTY keyboard with the Dvorak layout, Dvorak keyboards would now be standard. Does this sound unimportant? Check the thousands of people who suffer from carpel tunnel syndrome and other disorders related to the use of a keyboard that was designed for mechanical expediency instead of human use. But in addition to that benefit, talking back collectively on smaller issues can give us the strength and the courage to talk back on larger ones. The way I usually argue this is in relation to telephones: If you can't say no to something as simple as call waiting, can you really expect to say no to something as complex and ingrained as racism?
The world wide web allows people to link into any site they choose. Although this can have many advantages, it can also completely destroy the context and hence the significance of a text or an image. My solution for this is to change file names whenever you find someone making this kind of link to something at your, thus sabotaging the link. A number of people criticize me for this, saying it goes against the spirit of the web or the nature of the medium or something of the sort. My answer is the spirit of the web or the nature of the media be damned whenever its function is to falsify or distort the labor of others. In like manner, many people with web sites take a proprietary interest in what they have, and become highly defensive or antagonistic when other people put up similar material, which they see as an encroachment on their own turf. If those of us with web site learned to cooperate with each other, we could share resources and avoid duplication of labor in a way that would be a benefit to everyone -- not simply the site holders, but readers as well. As important as many small, incremental acts of rebellion and cooperation may be in themselves, they may also be good practice for larger individual and collective actions. A lot of discussion of computers deals with education, and in a lot of this education is presumed to relate only to children and young people. Perhaps the most important, and least recognized, educational benefit of computers will come from educating ourselves to say no and to say yes, and to know when to do which. When it comes to collective action, there may be nothing more effective than computer interconnectivity.
Beneath a lot of the pro media rhetoric runs perhaps the most toxic strain of 20th century thought and history. that is the "technological imperative." According to this notion, if you have a tool you will be compelled to use it. One of the reasons often sited for the U.S. use of nuclear weapons against Japan is the technological imperative. We had it, hence we had no choice but to use it -- and then spending 50 years making up lies about the necessity of its use. Following this line of reasoning, since we now have the means of annihilating the whole of the human race, we have no option in the long run but self annihilation. If we can't guide and control the development of computer technology (a technology we 'cannot' get rid of), what chance do we have of preventing the ultimate genocide? Looking at the future from the most optimistic point of view possible, we could wonder if one of the main advantages of computer technology may be to help us develop the self restraint and self discipline (those characteristics so woefully lacking in states) that will be necessary to prevent our self destruction.
© Karl Young The Raven 32 pp313-327
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