Waiting with geeks

As I watch some passengers at the airport working furiously away at their laptops, it is clear that our information systems reflect our machines instead of our lives. Life without email simply freezes over for these geeks as I think they spend most of their wake hours in front of the system. What If they ever have to go outside? Will they put on welding goggles to save them from a massive dose of non-CRT radiation? They might as well….

I observed the guy sitting next to me and sensed his innate nerdity. He has been talking to a woman (a fellow passenger) about his hardware so seriously without meaning anything sexual at all… If I showed him a magazine full of nude pictures, this guy is sure to comment "that's got to be at least 400 dpi, colour !" Junkies of a cyber kind…

What a pity. The machines designed to be commanded by us now have enslaved us. The most important problem in computing is how to leave the hardware behind, how to transcend the computer and not be limited by the electronic accidents that constitute its architecture.

Now I know why I like David Gelernter so much. Despite his accomplishments in computer science, he isn’t one bit geeky. In fact his pet theory of Information Beams is inspired by life itself.

Get us a few more IT renaissance activists like you, David…

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