The force of microelectronics will blow apart all the monopolies, hierarchies, pyramids, and power grids of established industrial society. It will undermine all totalitarian regimes. Police states cannot endure under the advance of the computer because it increases the powers of the people far faster than the powers of surveillance.
The most dangerous threat to the U.S. economy and society is the breakdown of our cultural institutions – in the family, religion, education, and the arts – that preserve and transmit civilization to new generations. If this social fabric continues to fray, we will lose not only our technological prowess and economic competitiveness but also the meaning of life itself. The chief economic challenge we now face is how to apply the new technologies in a way that preserves the values and disciplines that made them possible in the first place.
In text, where the impact of digital technology came first and most fully, desktop-publishing programs have generated tens of thousands of new publishing ventures such as special-interest magazines. These developments offer the merest glimpse of the possibilities of digital video. Released from the restrictions of mass media, American culture could attain new levels in both the visual arts and literature.
The central processing units of 16 Cray YMP supercomputers, once costing collectively some $320 million, will be manufacturable for under $100 on a single microchip. Such a silicon sliver will contain approximately one billion transistors, compared to some 20 million transistors in currently leading-edge devices … The four-kilohertz telephone lines to America’s homes and offices will explode into some 25 thousand billions of possible hertz of fiber optics … Television and telephone systems – optimized for a world in which spectrum or bandwidth was scarce – are utterly unsuited for a world in which bandwidth is abundant.
Revenues from telephones and televisions are currently at an all-time peak. But the industries organized around these two machines will not survive the century … As the telephone network becomes a computer network, it will have to change, root and branch. All the assumptions of telephony will have to give way to radically different assumptions. Telephony will die … TV ignores the reality that people are not inherently couch potatoes; given a chance, they talk back and interact. People have little in common except their prurient interests and morbid fears and anxieties. Necessarily aiming its fare at this lowest-common-denominator target, television gets worse and worse every year. Television is a tool of tyrants. Its overthrow will be a major force for freedom and individuality, culture and morality. That overthrow is at hand.
I don’t understand the hullabaloo. Can you imagine a more frivolous way to spend billions, hooking up people’s homes so that kids can compete playing Marioworld? The Information Highway is a buzzword, created by public-relations people and folks at the White House who want to be seen as technology visionaries. To me, it doesn’t mean anything.
The Internet is going to become the medium for transmitting or providing information in almost every field you can think of, but you’ll still need a public entity that acts for the community in providing access. That’s the library.
As a society, we are entering the information age the way a child enters the ocean for the first time – partly in, partly out, partly fearful, partly intrigued, and not really quite sure what to do next.
Public life will have disappeared because we did not see, in time to reverse the process, that our dazzling technologies were privatizing almost all social activities. It became first possible, then necessary, to vote at home, shop at home, listen to music at home, see movies at home. We replaced our libraries with interactive videotext, which even encouraged individuals to change the ending of stories if they didn’t like them, so that there no longer existed common literature. We replaced schools with home computers and television. We replaced meeting friends with the video telephone and electronic mail. We replaced visits to far away places with virtual reality. We became afraid of real people and eventually forgot how to behave in public places, which had become occupied almost entirely by criminals. The rest of us had no need to be with each other.
In the best case, says Mitch Kapor, we could collectively invent a new entertainment medium, one that taps the creative energies of a nation of midnight scribblers and camcorder video artists. “In the worst case we could wind up with networks that have the principal effect of fostering addiction to a new generation of electronic narcotics.”