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Date: Mon, 7 Feb 1994 09:16:08 -0500
From: gbs@PANIX.COM(Eric Braun)
Subject: File 8--Pessimism in CuD (Response to Technological Disasters)

The anti-hype of your "A GUIDE TO TECHNOLOGICAL DISASTERS TO COME" in
CuD 6.13 is refreshing and much appreciated, but unfortunately your
pessimistic future is presented as a forgone conclusion rather than a
possible endpoint.  Perhaps that was rhetorically necessary, but there
are a couple things to keep in mind:

1) Numerous on-line commercial ventures were set up hoping to spoon
feed their customers with home-shopping and entertainment services,
but found that the inter-personal communication services that had been
tacked on as an afterthought were what people really wanted.  This
paints a different picture from your gloomy one of the slobby American
couch potato.

2) Changes in form can be accompanied by changes in content, in fact,
the _best_ time to change the structure of content, its quality
control and the incentives systems that produce it, is when form is
changing as well.  You might say that every political revolution is
doomed to failure because "the mediums may change but the content will
remain the same," but clearly this is not true.  Occasionally when an
old regime is overthrown the new form of government, enables an
entirely new kind of nation.

It is up to us to seize the day.


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