1 of 9
This is the concluding article in a three-part series.
Article 1: Computer Control
Article 2: Life Among the Cyber-Amish
Dr. Gelernter:
People with advanced degrees aren't as smart as they think they are. If you'd had any brains you would have realized that there are a lot of people out there who resent bitterly the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world and you wouldn't have been dumb enough to open an unexpected package from an unknown source.
In the epilog of your book, "Mirror Worlds," you tried to justify your research by claiming that the developments you describe are inevitable, and that any college person can learn enough about computers to compete in a computer-dominated world. Apparently, people without a college degree don't count. In any case, being informed about computers won't enable anyone to prevent invasion of privacy (through computers), genetic engineering (to which computers make an important contribution), environmental degradation through excessive economic growth (computers make an important contribution to economic growth) and so forth.
As for the inevitability argument, if the developments you describe are inevitable, they are not inevitable in the way that old age and bad weather are inevitable. They are inevitable only because techno-nerds like you make them inevitable. If there were no computer scientists there would be no progress in computer science. If you claim you are justified in pursuing your research because the developments involved are inevitable, then you may as well say that theft is inevitable, therefore we shouldn't blame thieves.
But we do not believe that progress and growth are inevitable.
We'll have more to say about that later.
FC
"Dr. Gelernter" is David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale University, who received this letter on April 23, 1995. "FC," other documents from the same author explained, stands for Freedom Club—but despite the use of plural pronouns in this letter and many others, one person wrote the message: Theodore Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber. On June 23, 1993, Gelernter had opened "an unexpected package" that immediately exploded, wounding him severely. In 1998, Theodore Kaczynski pled guilty to the charge of being the "unknown source" of the package that injured Gelernter.
It seemed strange to many that Kaczynski should single out Gelernter, who is distinctive among computer scientists for his aesthetic sensibilities and his lack of enthusiasm for technology as such. Indeed, some of Gelernter's warnings about over-reliance on computers can sound oddly like statements in the Unabomber's notorious Manifesto. (A more likely antagonist would be someone like Ted Nelson, inventor and promoter of "hypertext," who in his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines exhorted, "You can and must understand computers NOW.") But perhaps it was Gelernter's very humaneness that, to Kaczynski, made him so dangerous: by striving, in several books, to demystify computer technology and usage; by designing hardware and software that would be comfortable, functional, and unintimidating to ordinary users; by insisting that people with no formal training in computer programming could nevertheless come to understand at least the basics of how computers work, Gelernter might actually do more to solidify the place of computers in our everyday lives than the real "techno-nerds" ever could.
Kaczynski's arguments stand in direct contradiction to the thoughts and concerns that have motivated this series of essays. Like Gelernter, I have assumed that the continuing, indeed the increasing, centrality of computers to our culture is "inevitable." I suspect that Kaczynski secretly thought so too: he was certainly smart enough to know that the use of computers is not curtailed by the bombing of a computer scientist. If he had real hopes of lessening our dependence on computers, he would have attacked the machines themselves—or the factories that made them—just as the 19th-century Luddites destroyed the knitting machines that were putting them out of work. Kaczynski's resort to mail bombs is really an admission of futility.
RSS Feed
