Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. Whipping the sledgehammer around her head like an Olympian winding up for the hammer toss, she launches it at the screen, which smashes to bits in an explosion of blinding light and smoke.


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The explosion generates a wind that blows through the hypnotized masses and, one infers, awakens them, setting off the revolution. Only three years earlier, almost to the day, Ronald Reagan famously announced, in his inaugural address: The new world, Apple tells us, will be about empowering the individual. The Macintosh performed a remarkable feat of triangulation, whereby an individual could realize his or her potential through self-expression using cutting-edge technology while also rebelling against authority — all by purchasing a luxury good.

Commentary - AVGN: Back to the Future Re-Revisited

Fashionable consumerism as individual rebellion. The launch of the Macintosh captured a zeitgeist and established a value set for the tech sector, one that has been adopted widely throughout American society: That world, Apple now declared, was obsolete. These mutant rebel children of Timothy Leary and William Gibson dreamed of living an impossible future in the present.

Smart drugs, raves, zines, Survival Research Laboratories, Burning Man, and early iterations of virtual reality populated countercultural visions of a utopian anarchist society of cyberpunks and urban primitives living off the grid in self-sufficient solar-powered yurts — all connected by the internet. I had fallen in love with the internet before it even existed, through reading science fiction. I built my first personal website on earthlink. Few of us early netizens had any idea what was to come, of how quickly and completely the seemingly endless possibilities of the internet would be co-opted, consolidated, and ultimately dashed.

Some of the Old Guard was openly disdainful. The Old Guys thought it made the Dot Com kids look like cocky idiots. In a way, they were both right. Some ideas were stupid: Others were just ahead of their time, like Pseudo. In his memoir about working at Amazon. We began to believe that by supporting Amazon. Here again we see the young future monoliths positioning themselves as rebels, punks, and revolutionaries. Even amid this irrational exuberance, even as the language of the counterculture was co-opted for corporate gain, a small subculture persisted with genuinely communitarian dreams of a non-commercial internet that would actually bring people together: By publishing ourselves on the web, we reject the role of passive media marketing recipient.

The Future Revisited

When we first met in bars or cafes, we would often introduce ourselves by our URLs. When I started blogging, I felt no restraint. Rather, it felt like a private place unlike any other, a place where I no longer needed to perform some version of myself. I could write truthfully, brutally, and sometimes beautifully about my life, expose my innermost self with only the handful of people with whom I had shared my URL.

In the late s, by virtue of having taught myself HTML, I got hired as interactive producer and brand strategist at a global ad agency. It was a beautiful day, warm, with a clear blue sky. I got to work around 8: Then I heard a loud bang. As far as I know, this was the first time that a global event of this scale was reported on, in real time, by eyewitnesses, self-publishing on the internet. I proceeded to blog for the next week. I got supportive, compassionate emails and comments on my posts from all over the world. From that experience I came to believe, if only for a little while, in the power of the internet to connect people in meaningful ways, to help us find each other in times of need.

The tech sector was relatively slow to rebound. Into this vacuum stepped Nick Denton, who started hiring New York City bloggers to shape the editorial voice and direction of Gawker. The launch of Gawker and its related properties legitimized blogging as a force in the media sector. Old Media publishers were suddenly scouring blogs for new voices to whom they could offer book deals or were launching blogs for their existing brands, often developing proprietary content management systems. Platforms like Tumblr evolved, and Squarespace made it easier and easier for anyone to build a personal website.

And blogging was just the tip of the iceberg. The first social network I joined was Friendster in In retrospect, the platform launched too early and nobody quite knew what to do with it. In September , Facebook opened its doors to anyone over 13 with an email address, and the rest is history. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and the rise of mobile technology transformed social networks into social media, creating an entirely new mediaverse populated and powered by user-generated content, all owned by a very few massive corporations presided over by a small number of billionaires. But what about the technology that made this all possible?

While this vision was markedly different from the traditional Democratic commitment to social programs, in that it was rooted in the neoliberal belief in free markets, Gore and his colleagues nonetheless saw that the government had a significant role to play in fostering technological innovation. Inspired by the role his father, Senator Al Gore Sr. This legislation led to technological advances that made the internet as we know it possible, including the creation of the Mosaic browser.


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Released on January 23, , Mosaic opened the internet and the World Wide Web to the general public for the first time. But we do all this as consumers in a marketplace, not as citizens in a republic. The social contract has been broken, the social safety net dismantled, and social media is anything but social — it is, by design, the exact opposite. By questioning them now, perhaps we can change the future.

See a Problem?

All of those things are true. But the harder story is that of the path not taken. Simplicity is assumed to be a virtue, the interface is supposedly easy to use, and complexity is hidden. At all points, individual experience is privileged over collaboration. In her book Reclaiming Conversation: As the project of dismantling government that began in earnest in continues apace, it is worth remembering that it was the materially affluent and stable society of postwar America that made the tech sector as we know it today possible.

It is ironic that a sector built on a distrust of centralized power — either corporate or governmental — continues to consolidate power and resources. It is equally ironic that a sector that in so many ways owes its very existence to government support and a prosperous postwar society has played such a pivotal role in the disintegration of that society.

On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. Barlow conveniently overlooks the fact that cyberspace, as it currently exists, is not a public good but rather a commodity.


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  • The Future, Revisited: “The Mother of All Demos” at 50 - Los Angeles Review of Books?

    • We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. Victoria rated it really liked it Jan 17, Maya rated it really liked it May 13, Jim Hayes rated it it was amazing Jun 01, Jhseltzer rated it it was amazing Aug 05, I read Heinlein's classic novel in German which proved to be challenging when getting into the math stuff. Regardless of that, this work is an intriguing set of interlinking stories about an alternate future that may have occurred if humanity made other choices.

    This fascinating concept is spun out over more than one century. Written in , but published decades later, the stories contain aspects that seem ridiculously obsolete to a present day reader. In my case, I found those aspects excepti I read Heinlein's classic novel in German which proved to be challenging when getting into the math stuff. In my case, I found those aspects exceptionally hilarious.

    The Future Revisited by Robert A. Heinlein

    Other aspects however, showed vision and feasible development in human society that seemed so tangible that they scared me. I will refrain from putting in any spoilers here. What bothered me were chapters that seemed rudimentary and cut-off. It bothered me to the level of getting lost in my own thoughts filling in the gaps the writer apparently left for his readers to deal with.

    CONTINUE TO BILLING/PAYMENT

    Nevertheless, it's a work that all lovers of scifi should read. If only because of its references to technology that is in everyone's life today, the feasibility of what might happen if humanity persists in making choices that are askew to say the least, and because of what might have been if we as a species would have sped up the space race. Werner rated it liked it Jan 01, Kevin rated it really liked it Sep 04, Julie Emovon rated it it was amazing Feb 23, Eric rated it really liked it Feb 14, Deveny Beneke rated it liked it Feb 28, Will rated it it was amazing Jul 23, Michael marked it as to-read Jan 09, John marked it as to-read Jan 13, Daniel Black added it Jan 25, George Enell marked it as to-read Mar 20, Bruce added it May 23, Ian marked it as to-read Jul 06, Cees added it Jul 09, Meryki marked it as to-read Oct 18, Kat marked it as to-read Oct 28, Abbey added it Nov 12, Eugene marked it as to-read Nov 20, Dana marked it as to-read Dec 28, Lonna Duzan marked it as to-read Jan 18, David Webb added it Jan 19, Pmweather marked it as to-read Feb 11, Lissaleo marked it as to-read Mar 01, Daniel Hawk marked it as to-read Mar 27, Robert added it Apr 04, Matthew Atkinson marked it as to-read Apr 30, Bob Deragisch marked it as to-read Apr 22, Joel marked it as to-read Apr 29, Steve added it Jun 06, Lee Nelson marked it as to-read Jun 21, Avid Reader and Geek Girl marked it as to-read Jul 07, Rob Bekkers added it Aug 17, Rae Slavin marked it as to-read Dec 03,