Status Updates From The Net Delusion: The Dark ...

After all, it's not historians of technology but futurists - those who prefer to fantasize about the bright but unknowable future rather than confront the dark but knowable past - that make the most outrageous claims about the fundamental, world-transforming significance of any new technology, especially if it is already on its way to making the cover of Time magazine.

The technologists, especially technology visionaries who invariably pop up to explain technology to the wider public, "largely extrapolate from today or tomorrow while showing painfully limited interest in the past," as Howard Segal, another historian of technology, once mused. This, perhaps, explains the inevitable barrage of utopian claims every time a new invention comes along.

Not surprisingly, the dangerous fascination with solving previously intractable social problems with the help of technology allows vested interests to disguise what essentially amounts to advertising for their commercial products in the language of freedom and liberation.

Another problem with technological fixes is that they usually rely on extremely sophisticated solutions that cannot be easily understood by laypeople. The claims of their advocates are, thus, almost impenetrable to external scrutiny, while their ambitious promise — the elimination of some deeply entrenched social ill — makes such scrutiny, even if it is possible, hard to mount.