First Post: The Zen of Hindu Software

“It’s almost impossible for most people to see technology as the tool rather than the end,” [Alan Kay] was saying one day … “People get trapped in thinking that anything in the environment is to be taken as a given. It’s part of the way our nervous system works. But it’s dangerous to take it as a given because then it controls you, rather than the other way around. That’s McLuhan’s insight, one of the bigger ones in the twentieth century. Zen in the twentieth century is about taking things that have been rendered invisible by this process and trying to make them visible again.”

:. — Michael A. Hiltzick quoting Alan Kay in the inestimably valuable book Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age