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58
This was Orwell’s vision of the future: technology would become the tool
of totalitarian dictatorship. TV and computers would make Big Brother possible.
Fortunately, Orwell got it exactly wrong. The high-tech devices that have
invaded our lives – home computers, fax machines, VCRs and eventually the
Internet – have expanded human freedom.
On the Redmond, Wash., campus of the Microsoft Corporation there is
not much doubt that technology is a wonderful thing. It has made many of the
software programmers, wandering the halls in jeans and T-shirts, rich men and
women while still in their 20s or 30s. People in Cyberworld – shorthand for the
culture of computers and telecommunications – passionately believe that today’s
technology revolution is also a revolutionary advance for human liberty. But
most of them even don’t remember the time when computers especially were
thought to be a menace to freedom. Orwell was far from the only doubter who
worried that ever-bigger computers would lead to centralization of information
and power.
However, around 1980 the desktop personal computer came to market and
gave the enormous power to the individual. Tiny businesses could do what only
large ones could before. Even within big businesses employees had much more
autonomy. A symbolic development was the arrival of inexpensive tax-
preparation software. Today you can use your home PC to do your income tax
quickly and accurately, while the Internal Revenue Service still can’t get its own
giant computers to work right.
Even more important was another development of the 1980s: the fax
machine. It can speed up work in offices enabling them to spread information in
no time.
Then, in 1990s, along came the Internet. It empowered individuals,
compared with big corporations, even more dramatically than had the PC.
Although there is nothing necessarily wrong with big corporations either. Take
Michael Kinsley as an example who works for Microsoft publishing an on-line
magazine called Slate. By publishing on-line they have no paper costs, no
printing costs, no postage costs. Their articles are instantly available to anyone
with a computer and a modem anywhere in the world.
These same people can also use a computer and a modem to publish on-
line themselves. All it takes is a bit of software and an affordable month fee for
Internet access.
Of course, the Internet has its drawbacks. For example, nothing about the
Internet guarantees that the information it spreads so easily is completely true. In
fact, the Internet is a caldron of implausible rumors, zapping around the world at
the speed of light. More troubling, sexually explicit material can be
disseminated on the Internet just as easily as any other information. And many
people want to stop that, mainly because of children.
On balance, most people would concede that the advantages of today’s
technologies, including the Internet, outweigh the disadvantages. Certainly our
freedom has been enhanced on the everyday personal level.
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