Public Nuisances: For Your Information
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
For Your Information by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Correct me if I am in error, but the present Computer Civilization that awes us all is essentially absorbed with gathering...
...Unlike successful industrial movements in the past, the rise of Computer Civilization is being led by eggheads with enthusiasm for art, ideas, music...
...They counsel...
...Right now it is influencing life on earth more pervasively than any other invention in history...
...Dance madly...
...Correct me if I am in error, but the present Computer Civilization that awes us all is essentially absorbed with gathering information and sending it thither...
...The fundamental instrument of Computer Civilization, the computer, is a creation of sheer science...
...Most likely Computer Civilization is in its incunabular period...
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...As Kay's remarks suggest, the wilder vagaries of their minds are disciplined intellectually by their expeRight now the computer is influencing life on earth more pervasively than any other invention in history...
...Which brings me to something else I have noted about the denizens of Computer Civilization: Many cherish a touching faith in cultures primitive and remote...
...Then Kay returned to the cryptic...
...And it is only the beginning of the thing...
...Few are, and those politicians that have expressed doubts have been castigated...
...Newspapers for some time have been writing of "campaign reform...
...This is a world that is a genuine threat to Kultursmog...
...Metcalfe maintains a farm devoted to breeding nearly extinct farm animals...
...Kay, for instance, plays the organ seriously...
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...Combined with developments in medical science, they may in the next century contribute to...what...
...And well he might...
...Wells, a sociologist, and Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost...
...Johnson had overlooked the possibilities in the word "reform...
...Simonyi collects art and is an enthusiast for modern architecture...
...Call it a Kultursmog...
...Talk of global markets is talk of free markets, and that too is a breath of fresh air in the Kultursmog...
...And now we have this special issue on Computer Civilization, featuring intellectual fisticuffs by Metcalfe and Gilder themselves, along with much more...
...At the end of a century in which mankind's inventions--whether scientific, political, or cultural--have caused so much pain, the immediate consequences of Computer Civilization seem only to have been salutary...
...The techies are predicting as much...
...No, the present age so suddenly enlivened by the development of the computer is much more than an Information Age, and besides, the information transmitted is often not really worth knowing...
...The radiant minds that created the personal computer and all the advances that have come with it constitute the most liberating influence to come to the culture in generations...
...Someday they might well mate...
...The high culture of this country has been dead for years, polluted by a stifling ideology that might call itself liberal, but is actually simply infantile collectivist...
...They are bringing products that expand culture and make it more accessible...
...Its firmly fixed place in civilization notwithstanding, she wanted to know if it could be used to "make people more civil...
...Though the mental illnesses of the 196o's do pop up occasionally--for instance, the virginal lady enthusing over the civility of the faraway...
...Hi ho, there you have it, the earliest stages of the Internet, and no electricity was needed...
...rience with science and engineering...
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...Read Aristotle...
...Not that we at The American Spectator have been oblivious...
...At Pop!Tech, a Computer Civilization conference I attended last fall, a virginal young lady of impressively nerdy mien declared to Alan Kay, a founding father of the personal computer, "I have found that the farther one gets from civilization, the more civil people are...
...But Frank, wherever you are, people do talk about music...
...Computers ascertain conditions everywhere: in your automobile, in manufacturing plants, 2 5 YEARS AGO IN The American Spectator On learning of Samuel Johnson's remark that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, Roscoe Conkling, a New York politician widely acquainted with scoundrels, remarked that Dr...
...They might well depollute the Kultursmog...
...She was not thinking of applying its civilizing magic to, say, East Timor or Rwanda, but to us, presumably to the fellow seated next to her or perhaps even to Kay...
...The computer can be used to locate information until recently accessible only at the largest libraries, and can find it faster than any librarian anywhere unassisted by computers...
...That is why some people speak of the age as the Information Age...
...At one point he compared Stalin and Hitler with American politicians, and he was not kidding...
...Emdite, intelligent, and ambitious in his thoughts, Kay is typical of the best minds leading us into this age of the computer...
...Because there is so much more to this swelling age than communications, I think a more expressive term denoting the age might be Computer Civilization...
...Nonetheless, she was full of hope for the computer...
...No one can say how it will end...
...And at Pop!Tech John Perry Barlow, a writer of some sort for the Grateful Dead, was abundant with apocalyptic pish posh...
...He is enthusiastic about its possibilities, but being a man of science, he expects its excesses to be disciplined by science...
...Who could be against it...
...people do not dance about architecture...
...By and large, however, the techies of Computer Civilization bring to our culture a breeze that is shaking things up...
...Computers today predict...
...The tech wizards now see tiny computers being implanted in our vital organs to advise us of when we might want to get a new, improved version...
...Read it carefully before you invest or send money...
...The techies of Computer Civilization are relatively free of the Weltschmerz, the antiAmericanism, and the hatred of the West that we see in the Kultursmog...
...am a willing co-conspirator with the heralds and wizards of Computer Civilization...
...The American Spectator _9 May z o o o 15...
...But that is not all...
...He quoted Frank Zappa's pronunciamento that "talking about music is like dancing about architecture...
...Our Website, begun in 1996 , has thanks to our staff's ingenious exertions become one of the Internet's liveliest, with nearly one million page hits a month...
...No one snickered or pointed out that her thought about the higher "civility" to be found in remote regions was as dead as the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who championed the idea a generation ago, and the New Guinean who was reported eaten by his neighbor in the last edition of the Continuing Crisis...
...To immortality...
...If the present era of dot-corn mania were only about conveying information, the instrument used for the conveyance--namely, the computer -- would merely be an evolutionary leap beyond the smoke signals of the American red Indian or the sonorous thuds of some half-naked drummer diligently walloping out a message to his colleagues across the swamp and down by the giant ant hill where grandpa was buried...
...Few have been able to breathe any life into it at all...
...Through their wealth they are joining boards of educational institutions that need a rebirth, and owing to the techies' relatively free-market orientation they are causing that rebirth to be more libertarian...
...such matters as creativity and the "extreme democratization" of ~, j the Intemet, Kay--the engineer who invented early wireless computer systems known as Dynabook and Smalltalk, and solved the problem of how to overlap windows on computer screens--returns to the discipline of science...
...At Pop!Tech there was a sense of optimism and a respect of innovative imagination...
...Some good things and many bed things have been done in the name of reform, but the worst thing of all has been to cloak any proposal for change in the seductive disguise of that ill-used word...
...He had already referred to the works of John Sebastian Bach, H.G...
...Instead, Kay made an esoteric reference to the violin and wittily lamented its inability to tell time...
...Kay is a learned fellow...
...He seemed to be in sympathy with those of the Internet's critics who worry that expression on the Internet, unattended by editors or some sort of critical mind, is often sciolistic, occasionally the con jurings of mountebanks...
...q~he most important part of science is that there are these other people out there to debug the theories...
...James Q. Wilson Abolish "Reform" MAY 1975 14 May 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator in the upper atmosphere, and soon, in your very body...
...My object here is not to attack those proposals labeled "reforms" but to criticize the labeling of all proposals as reforms...
...No human being can be expected to be as tough on their ideas as their friends are" In the end, after ruminating about...
...George Gilder from our editorial board, Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and essential elements in the Internet, and Charles Simonyi of Microsoft, the inventor of such breakthroughs as WYSIWYG (What YOU See Is What You Get) word processing, have by their example and occasionally by exhortation moved me to an awareness of the arrival of this Computer Civilization...
...Kay in his talk to the assembled devotees of Computerland at Pop!Tech expressed apprehension that "the biggest difficulty with the extreme democratization of the Internet is that it gives everyone a voice, but it might not give everyone a direction...
Vol. 33 • May 2000 • No. 4
