The Transom: In Hoc Gizmo Vinces

Abstract

Whenever cognoscenti inform me that the Digital Revolution is only just beginning, neurons fire and I recall a scene from Norman Jewison’s futuristic film Rollerball, wherein the protagonist visits the world’s ultimate library in search of answers to some questions. There are no books in the library. There is only a computer, a huge liquid thing in which all the information in the world bubbles like sauce on a stove. The head librarian is an elderly man who is wholly preoccupied with the apparently malfunctioning gizmo. It has managed somehow to lose the entire thirteenth century. All of it is gone, quite possibly forever. The old librarian remarks with a shrug that the thirteenth wasn’t really much of a century, but nevertheless ... The protagonist, his presence ignored, departs with questions unanswered. Jewison’s film appeared in 1975, the same year in which Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft and a year before Steve Jobs co-founded Apple. Twenty-seven years later, Gates and Jobs were billionaires, and John McTiernan’s remake of Rollerball contained no reference to books, libraries, or the loss of a century. There were computers aplenty in that inferior film, but their principal function was to measure television viewership of blood sports for criminal elements. 1 Meanwhile, real-world computer networking, which began in the late 1960s, blossomed into the Internet in the early 1980s, and everyone who could afford to buy a computer was using the device for everything from shopping to bill-paying to record-keeping to gameplaying, and partaking of other forms of diversion and entertainment too numerous to mention. Universities became major purchasers of computers; and, on campuses everywhere, faculty, staff, and students embraced them to supposed advantage. Cutting-edge stuff, and all that. The computer was the surfboard upon which