In reading Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier, I found his portrait of where we’re at with digital technology and where we’re headed chilling. It activated all my reforming impulses.
The fact that Lanier has a very clear sense of how a do-over is possible, of how it might not have to be this way makes it all the stronger. I get skeptical, of course, wonder how such a grand change in something that developed so all at once, so altogether, so piece by piece. It feels like trying to rebuild the foundation of a house without wrecking the house on top.
How could such a change happen, given how hard monumental change can be. But hope springs up and I want to join a chorus of voices, to say with lots of others, “O, reform it altogether!”
The Hamlet Project 