As so often happens with computers, the cutting edge of desktop publishing became a swamp and then a backwater. Savvy publishers took advantage of the distributed environment coupled with the disconnectedness of it all to put the servitude of function together with the servitude of finance. So, while beginning to explore new avenues of employment in the areas of CD's and hypertext publishing, we continued to compete in the typesetting field, and got good prices for a while in Utah and the Southwest. We even hired freelancers third-hand in Singapore and Haiti. Our topic today is slavery.
Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing.
On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. Somehow, in the arena of desktop publishing typesetting, human servitude to the exacting output demands of the machine is more the norm. The focus is output, and people become blind inputters of accurate information in the same way that minimum wage workers in supermarkets do when running barcodes over optical scanners. I'm painting a grim picture, but the tide is about to turn. In the late '80s, we began to produce and typeset books about computer networking, books focusing on the structure and function of globally interlinked computers, which seemed to elicit life from people when used as a communications medium, rather than demeaning them when used as an output medium.