Interesting Ideas: We're all saps

The fundamentalists are right to be suspicious to the point of paranoia about the computer's ever-widening role in structuring our world and organizing our lives.

Is there any question that dependence on a very particular structure of technology only grows -- evident in the way I'm writing this and you're reading it? It is no anomaly that each new release of any major commercial PC program binds us that much more closely to the specifics of Microsoft's Windows system. It requires no conspiracy from Bill Gates, just the normal advantages of technological development to solidify our subordination.

Technology looks more and more like Tolkien's Rings: freely distributed, empowering, but ultimately "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them."

The same dynamic that J.R.R. expressed in the story of the Rings, Michael Journal grasps in paranoia (though mislocating the evil in Brussels and the Beast). It is a metaphor many of us live every day as we spend the precious hours of our lives, and bet our livelihoods, on a brittle mechanism whose truest web is one of dependencies.

In short, we make an enormous, and for many of us bittersweet, leap of faith every time we log on. However much we might fancy ourselves savvy, hard-headed realists, in cyberspace we're all saps.

More, if you can take it.

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