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But I do not believe that the inevitability of computers equals the inevitability of theft. Theft is a crime, the computer a technological product; and the problem with technology is always to find a way to put it to proper uses while avoiding putting it to dangerous, destructive, or immoral uses. True, any knowledge I gain about computers will do nothing to halt experiments in genetic engineering or slow "excessive economic growth," though I can imagine ways in which computer-literate others might contribute to those causes; I also think it safe to say that my refraining from computer literacy, or even computer usage, won't be of any help. But within my own daily sphere of action, I believe that increasing my ability to use computers can be helpful to me. (And it can surely help me to preserve my privacy, though that goal is not high on my list.)

I was encouraged, as I began this project in self-education, to discover the very comment from Gelernter's Mirror Worlds that angered Kaczynski. I was likewise emboldened by this statement from the engineer Henry Petroski: "I believe that anyone today is capable of comprehending the essence of, if not of contributing to, even the latest high technology"—though I think I would have felt considerably more emboldened if this sentence had come at the beginning of a 400-page book about computers, instead of a 400-page book called The Pencil. (It's a wonderful book, though.) I have tried to record, especially in the second essay in this series, some of the rewards (as well as some of the frustrations) that I have received in my plunge into the world of computer technology, especially my encounter with Linux and the world of open-source software. But I am faced now with certain important questions that I have not even begun to address.

Looking back over the reading I have done in preparing to write this essay, I notice a widespread tendency to speak of the concerns raised by the increasing prevalence of computers as technological concerns; the assumption shared by almost all parties is that any "problem" following from the cultural dominance of computers is but a special case of what the philosopher Martin Heidegger famously called "the question concerning technology." Henry Petroski emphasizes the links between pencils and computers: both are technological products. Kaczynski sneers at "techno-nerds"; some years later, as I noted in the first essay in this series, Gelernter would tacitly respond by writing that "to hate technology is in the end to hate humanity, to hate yourself, because technology is what human beings do." (Thus the title of another of Petroski's books: To Engineer Is Human.)

But I have become convinced that technology as such is not the issue at all.

We come closer to the heart of the matter when we think of computers in terms of information technology. Here the work of the philosopher Albert Borgmann is important. In his seminal book Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium, Borgmann identifies three types of information:

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