Weekly Column
Was Humanity Simply Not Ready for the Internet?
A 1990s cyber enthusiast considers whether he’s to blame for our digital woes
As someone who celebrated the potential for digital technology to unleash entirely new dimensions of collective human potential, I can’t help but feel a little culpability for our predicament. After my talks these days, people regularly ask me if I feel “sorry” for having written books like Cyberia and Playing the Future, which attempted to frame emerging digital society as a “renaissance.” Back in 1992, I told everybody to come on in, the water is fine! Do I now accept any of the blame for today’s combined plagues of disinformation, economic inequality, automation, and weaponized memetics?
Maybe. Maybe we just weren’t ready.
Steve Jobs as much as told us we were making a pact with the devil. He knew perfectly well what he was doing when he named his company Apple: He was giving people access to the forbidden fruit—the tree of knowledge—and fully disclosing that fact. Thanks to computers and, soon after, the internet, regular people everywhere would have access to everyone and everything.
And we bit into that apple. Why not? It looked like newfound power for the masses, a voice for the counterculture, an…
