Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Superhighway.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick

Subj: Computers and community Date: 95-10-25 From: NGilles123@aol.com To: skeptic@ubu.edu

Yes, by all means, let's keep talking about how technology in general and computers in particular affect our world today - and will influence our word tomorrow. But first, a pop quiz: Of the four following quotations, can you tell which one is written by the Unabomber?

1. "Few of society's major losses happen during sudden hurricanes or earthquakes....[T]he big time disasters creep up on us; by the time we notice something missing, it's already been wasted. Our cities weren't destroyed by atomic bombs or bubonic plague....The telephone eroded the art of writing letters. Television cut into neighborhood cinemas. MTV and superstars weakened amateur musicians and hometown bands. The car destroyed urban trolley systems; interstate highways devastated passenger rail service; and airliners wiped out passenger ships."

2. "The primary human relations - to space, time, nature, and to other people - have been subjected to a warping pressure that is something new under the sun. Those who argue that the very nature of history is change - that change is constant - are missing the point. Our era has seen an escalation of the rate of change so drastic that all possibilities of evolutionary accommodation have been short-circuited....[W]e have stepped...out of an ancient and familiar solitude and into an enormous web of imponderable linkages. We have created the technology that not only enables us to change our basic nature, but that is making such change all but inevitable....None of this, I'm afraid, will seem very obvious to the citizen of the late twentieth century. If it did, there would be more outcry."

3. "Before 1900, daily life for the majority of individuals was agrarian, static, local - in other words, not that different from what it had been for centuries. The twentieth century, however, altered the pace and pattern of daily life forever....What started us on the road to unreality? Though the catalog reads like a shopping list of many of the century's most dramatic trends - urbanization, consumerism, increasing mobility, loss of regionality, growing alienation from the landscape and so on - technology...was the real force behind our journey toward abstraction....Let me state my case as directly as possible: [I]t is possible to see, in a number of technologies spawned by recent developments in the computer world, an attack on reality as human beings have always known it."

4. "There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is....Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe....In the modern world it is human society that dominates nature rather than the other way around, and modern society changes very rapidly owing to technological change [T]here is no stable framework."

Time's up. It's number four, but it isn't obvious, is it? The other passages are from, respectively, Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, and Mark Slouka's War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality. All three books, in slightly different ways and with slightly different emphases, take on computers and related issues. But as you can tell from the lines quoted above, their contempt for computers is part of a larger critique of Technology writ large. Like the Unabomber, Stoll, Birkerts, and Slouka characterize technology - a term that refers to everything from stone axes to particle accelerators - as disruptive and discombobulating, never enabling or enriching.

For them, it's as if technology is flinging humanity through time and space at such a step that the g-force is making our skin pull away from our eyes and our lips flap away from our gums; we're being crushed by such dizzying speed. Rub your eyes and poof! Horses are out, autos are in. Blink again: Books are extinct, hypertext is cock of the spacewalk. As the Unabomber would put it, there is no "stable framework," no way to make sense of what man hath wrought, no way to evaluate change before it's too late.

Such sentiments appeal to a very basic conservative part of human nature: Stick with what you know, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, anything new is worth waiting for. Who can't relate to Miniver Cheevy who "loved the days of old," or the Wild West outlaw who, after 30 years in jail, is released into a strange new 20th-century world of moving pictures and flying machines?

But such notions grossly misrepresent both the pace and nature of technological change. Things change over time and unevenly: I know plenty of...