It's important to realize that even while this was published in a book in 2000, it was originally published in 1987. Many, many people were still using typewriters in 1987.
> I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.
Most of us who were around in the 80s and 90s were convinced that computers and then the internet were an express ticket to world peace. How could it not be? Turns out were were laughably naive.
I was around then and remember the promises of equalizing knowledge and removing conspiracies and falsehoods from public discourse because of the internet. If everyone had access to instantly fact check a wild claim, then false wild claims would disappear.
I do think that for good faith arguments the Internet has been very successful in removing unintentional falsehoods -- there's a lot less of the "Eskimos have 100 words for snow" nonsense than there used to be because people can easily check that that's a myth rather than just repeating something they once heard. But obviously things are different when people are trying to promote a falsehood even (or even especially) one they know to be false.
It's very easy to disagree. The Internet was used quite effectively for Arab Spring. It's effective enough that turning it off is a key tactic used by oppressors. I also suspect his typewriter use rapes our forest far beyond what a Raspberry Pi or any low wattage SBC and e paper monitor does. Both solar and a human powered generators would be much more environmentally concious than producing paper and ink. The computer is a tool. It can be used for good or bad. Computers don't create the bad things, people do.
The rebuttal contains perhaps my least favorite underhanded rhetorical tactic: Alice expresses a viewpoint, Bob disagrees, and Alice replies something along the lines of "wow, it seems I've really touched a nerve! You care so much; you're obsessed with this. You and the rest of the fanatics are zombies who unthinkingly oppose my considered ideas. The very intensity of your disagreement is proof that something is deeply wrong with the way you think about this."
I graduated college in 1987 (when the letter was first published.) I was probably the last generation to bring a typewriter. My freshman year I typed term papers on an old Smith-Corona. By my senior year, I was writing on a Commodore64 and printing on a dot-matrix printer (at the computer lab.) I also bought my first computer (Amiga 500!) that same year. This letter hasn't aged well obviously, but it wasn't a completely unreasonable position at that very brief point in time. Reminds me of the 1998 Paul Krugman quote https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/10/26/internet-fax/ about how the internet will be as impactful as the fax machine.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 38.4 ms ] thread> I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.
Most of us who were around in the 80s and 90s were convinced that computers and then the internet were an express ticket to world peace. How could it not be? Turns out were were laughably naive.
We were indeed laughably naive.