After the moon landing in 1969, there were about 25 years of hum-drum wireless phones as big as men's shoes, and DOS computers and dot-matrix printers with none of the charm or convenience of typewriters.
In 1988, as assistant production supervisor, I had a small office, a typewriter, manila file folders, and metal file drawers.
The Production department had two computers that my clever young boss had somehow programmed, through sheer genius, to create profit & loss forms.
The rest of us oafs, for whom programming was as remote as the moon, dutifully labored to learn how to input P&L data.
It was never a smooth process.
The entire production staff became wholly dependent on Colleen, my boss, to trouble-shoot the computers, as though she were the only one who could communicate in their language...which was exactly the case.
The World Wide Web became public in 1991.
In 1994, I was a temp. I had an office (before me, it was a supply closet) and, though Apple computers and PCs were in relatively wide use, I was given for my use a conventional half-ton typewriter.
By 1995, I was a bona fide employee, my typewriter had been replaced by a computer, and instead of cryptic DOS code, there were tidy folders on my screen.
I knew how to use a mouse to move a cursor. I could click on files to open them, name them, save them, and move them where I pleased.
And then, one day, deep in the midst of a Stokholm-Syndrome crush that I had on my boss, an instant message popped up on my computer screen.
"Hi! This is Tom. I'm aware that you're totally isolated over there in the supply closet. How are you surviving? Do you need anything? Can we send you a cake with a file in it?"
Tom was funny. Tom is still funny.
Tom was friends with Patrina Hope (not her real name). She was assistant to my boss.
If viewing an organizational chart, Patrina would be my boss's wife. I would be in the position of side interest.
I should set the record straight by saying, it wasn't what you're thinking, although I can see how I've led you to think that.
What I'm talking about is purely on the level of inward feeling, in no way reflective of outward acts.
There were no outwards acts whatsoever, despite the weird crushes that Patrina and I had on our enigmatic boss.
My crush was a result of being locked up in a utility closet eight hours a day, my only human contact or sense of purpose coming from this one person: Stan Canter (not his real name).
An only child of divorced parents who remarried into second families, I was an inveterate outsider from a young age.
As a temp, I had enjoyed a marginal status;
as a full-time employee who had been brought onboard by Stan without the customary ascent of other editors, I continued to enjoy my marginal status which, coupled with the location in a windowless utility closet in the back of the sales team of a wholly different department...
Well, let's just say, when Stan, in a fit of pique (having little if anything to do with me personally or professionally) indulged in brow-beating over some perceived deficiency on my part, I responded by sobbing loudly (with gasping) for three solid hours, sans break.
It was a mini nervous breakdown.
Flash ahead to 2019, when social justice experts refer to white women crying as a source of privilege.
Instead of taking it on the chin, as we ought, we cry--which is self-indulgent and a singular siren call to the white male, who will do or say anything to make said crying stop.
A white woman cries to harness white male power, to bend it to our will; crying is the ring in the nostril by which we may pull the ox by a thread.
It was a mini nervous breakdown, building up over weeks and months.
But it's also true that deep down inside some small rational focal point in my prefrontal cortex or other, I may have thought to myself, "Serves him right."
Because yes, those hours of grief-stricken sobs tormented Stan like a bludgeon wrought down repeatedly upon his nervous head.
No sooner would he flee my office, but he would return soon after, wringing his hands, gnashing his teeth, apologizing profusely.
And though part of me may have calculated this effect, I literally could not stop gasping for breath between sobs.
Because it was also true that I was an only child of divorced parents who had long felt like an outsider...An outsider with bright red hair like a beacon--like a solitary lighthouse on the shoals--and Stan, my keeper.
It was all very sick.
And then came Tom's message. "Can we bring you a cake with a file in it?"
Similar messages from Patrina followed.
She was a poet; and for all its precision and brevity, IM is a great temptation for poets. She was my own personal bard.
We beta testers were among the first to IM in the whole company--perhaps, in the whole industry; perhaps, in the whole country. (Probably not.)
It was like hearing the voice of another prisoner pass through a vent in the wall.
And, having said that, I remind myself that no, it was absolutely nothing like being in solitary confinement and it is craven and ridiculous to make that comparison.
But now I had two friends, whereas before there had only been Stan, who was neither friend nor lover nor normal boss.
Stan was an enigmatic character who passed through the corridors of publishing like a weather front. (Part of Patrina's job as his assistant was to advise us of the weather--Stan's mood.)
Instant messaging ended a kind of totalitarian authority that relies on an employee's social isolation.
IM effectively ended my Stockholm Syndrome (and opened up new cans of worms with other office mates...But I won't go into that).
The point is, IM was a big surprise, and one that quickly made a big impact on my life and relationships.
I'm not saying it was the lightbulb, Thomas Edison-like, but it was one of the first new things to come along that really made a big splash.
The next thing was email, the Internet, Yahoo, Google, small cell phones, texting, and smart phones.
It's a brave new world. Brave, in the sense that we didn't have any idea how these innovations would affect our lives, or impact our society, or our children's lives, or their future.
Facebook. Data points. Election interference. Cyber-stalking. X-box. Gameboy. Nintendo. First-person shooter games. YouTubers. Addiction. The dark side of the Internet. Pornography. Bitcoin.
E-commerce. Amazon. Algorithms.
For me, each of these words evokes some sense of their ramifications:
My kid spending too much time in their room, staring at their cellphone.
My kid being influenced by "influencers."
Our very selves being quantified, minutely categorized, demographically organized, and relentlessly marketed to or propagandized.
I just wonder why we should have to be so brave.
Why couldn't we, as a society, have had some sort of process in place for assessing the implications for each new seismic invention or innovation?
Because capitalism.
Stephen Hawking died believing that artificial intelligence would herald the end of humanity.
Should this not give us pause?
Surely profit is not the sole priority of the republic.
Democracy is in need of immediate rescue, as our own data points suggest fissures and fracture lines in which analytics may pound a wedge and split the whole thing wide apart.
Perhaps, some sort of preemptive body of ethics, some sort of social-welfare regulatory oversight might develop around saving democracy first--and humanity, second.
Maybe we'll look back on this period as a kind of technocratic Wild West--a period of reckless, unchecked, de-civilizing anarchy.
I know one thing: As a parent, I may as well have traveled to Wisconsin via conestoga wagon, for all the insight I bring to my son's generation.
Fade out on an image of a school cafeteria; long formica lunch tables lined with kids, all of them quietly staring down at their individual cellphones....
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