In Summary
This is Chapter 11 of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. Copyright 1995 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved. You may freely redistribute this chapter in its entirety for noncommercial purposes. For information about the author's online newsletter, NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, see http://www.netfuture.org/.
Our ever more intimate embrace of technology -- which now means especially computerized technology -- is hardly news. At the same time, anyone who claims to discern in this embrace a crisis for humanity risks becoming mere background noise in an era of rhetorical overkill. Nevertheless, something like such a claim is the main burden of this book.
The qualities of our technological embrace are admittedly difficult to assess. It's not just that we cannot buy things without participating in financial networks and contributing ourselves as “data” to consumer databases; nor that companies are now refusing to work with suppliers who lack “network-compatibility”; nor that in order to compete in most markets today, you must adapt your business to the computational landscape; nor that “knowledge” increasingly means “computer-processed and computer-accessible information”; nor that our children's education is being shifted online with a stunning sense of urgency; nor, finally, that our chosen recreations are ever more influenced by the computer's remarkable ability to frame alternate realities. ...
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