In a breathtakingly short time, our digital infrastructure has become the bastion of popular commerce. Computers are transforming into mere instruments of the entertainment industry, the content dumbed down to the Top-40 common denominator and blipped across our minds in hyperactive flash and noise. I don't mean to judge the values and tastes of others, but I'm troubled at the means by which society generates them. As I examine the economic mechanisms that drive our culture's technology decisions I see no counterbalance to the sheer overwhelming weight of commerce. There is no voice with heart or soul that speaks to our colletive conscience as we lurch forward.
Money drives all.
It seems that every decision is by the numbers, ruled by a faceless system completely owned by the principle of acquisition. In our rush to live our lives, it is so easy to forget that the computers, the internet and the digital games are not the ends in themselves. They are merely a potential for creating change. How we choose to use that potential and for what ends is up to us. For all the evangelizing we do for the Macintosh and all the drum-beating we do in its name, it is only a computer, a machine, bits of plastic and silicon and metal.