More and more people are looking to computers to save the world, but the people who run them certainly don’t know how. Nobody’s in charge, not even Google, though everyone in the dot-com world pretends.
Nobody imagined the vastness of the Internet, not even the kids who built it, or we wouldn’t be running out of addresses. We are in a world nobody designed or expected, driving full tilt toward — a wall? a cliff? a new dawn? We must choose wisely, as if we could.
On the one hand, we are getting bread and circuses, vast freebies unimaginable scant years ago — free e-mail, phone calls and maps, acres of picture space. On the other hand, somebody or something is reading your mail, and that same somebody or something is looking for new ways to control your future.
Some things are more and more fabulous, some things are more threatening and oppressive, except we don’t all agree on which is which. Are Facebook and Google marvelous ways of communicating, or a threat to our privacy? Yes!
In the face of all this, it is absolutely impossible to say what will happen.