Breaking up with Winston

Dear Winston,

These kinds of letters are always hard to write. When we first met, I thought you were pretentious, eccentric, and oh-so-British, but undoubtedly smart. I soon fell for your British accent (what American woman doesn't?) and began to lend credence to your talk of supervening social necessity, law of suppression of radical potential, and diffusion of innovation. Your insider accounts of the "real" story of technological innovations were fascinating.

We spent quiet nights together--you, me, and my 15-watt reading light--while my husband slept, oblivious to our trysts.

Your conviction that today's technological upheaval was really nothing new was so reassuring to a woman buffeted by technology overload. "This has happened before," you whispered. "There's really nothing so revolutionary about it." Oh, how comforting. The new technology's not going to overwhelm us after all! If it's been seen before, we have tools to deal with it!

Mistresses always want to believe pretty things, and it was a pretty thing indeed to think that we could predict technology's effects on society, and therefore be proactive, instead of reactive.

Last night, when we settled in together, I was so ready to hear your take on the Internet. "Prototypes and Ideation," the chapter head read importantly. "This Grand System," read the page headers--okay, I'm probably the only person who reads headers in books; it's a failing born of my years spent as a typesetter.

It started so promisingly--with a thorough analysis of the genesis of Arpanet, born of ARPA, soon-to-be-rechristened the faintly evil-sounding DARPA. Vannevar Bush was duly noted, the players and the plays painstakingly recounted. Oh, you had me last evening, Winston, as soon as we said hello.

But affairs usually end badly, and this one was no exception. Your painstaking analysis of the past broke down completely when you tried to predict the future. Hindsight's 20/20, alright, but you must cringe when you read your 1998 prophecies: "the limited Boolean logic of the search engines," "the disastrous application of the concept of commoditisation of information" [ed.: British spelling intact], "little support the idea that the net will become a crucial method for selling goods and services," "the creation of a virtual social community seems to have less, if any, purpose except as a sort of hobby." The evidence is damning.

Like a mistress being told "I love you, you're beautiful, but I'm going back to my wife," your words predicting the future of holography fell on deaf ears, Winston. How could any of the pretty tales you'd spun be believed, since you so clearly missed the implications of the Internet?

Well, I'll get over you, Winston. You led me down a garden path, but I should have trusted my instincts at the beginning. Like all relationships, I've come out of this one a changed, perhaps wiser woman. I will say this: I'll never forget you, and maybe there was something to your beloved concepts of supervening social necessity, and suppression of radical ideas.