In the Beginning...Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson Page A
Authors: Neal Stephenson
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pumping some sort of conspiracy theory.
But that is not where I’m going with this. The situation I describe here could be bad, but doesn’t have to be bad and isn’t necessarily bad now.
It simply is the case that we are way too busy, nowadays, to comprehend everything in detail. And it’s better to comprehend it dimly, through an interface, than not at all. Better for ten million Eloi to go on the Kilimanjaro Safari at Disney World than for a thousand cardiovascular surgeons and mutual fund managers to go on “real” ones in Kenya. The boundary between these two classes is more porous than I’ve made it sound. I’m always running into regular dudes—construction workers, auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoots in general—who were largely aliterate until something made it necessary for them to become readers and start actually thinking about things. Perhaps they had to come to grips withalcoholism, perhaps they got sent to jail, or came down with a disease, or suffered a crisis in religious faith, or simply got bored. Such people can get up to speed on particular subjects quite rapidly. Sometimes their lack of a broad education makes them overapt to go off on intellectual wild-goose chases, but hey, at least a wild-goose chase gives you some exercise. The spectre of a polity controlled by the fads and whims of voters who actually believe that there are significant differences between Bud Lite and Miller Lite, and who think that professional wrestling is for real, is naturally alarming to people who don’t. But then countries controlled via the command line interface, as it were, by double-domed intellectuals, be they religious or secular, are generally miserable places to live.
Sophisticated people deride Disneyesque entertainments as pat and saccharine, but if the result of that is to instill basically warm and sympathetic reflexes, at a preverbal level, into hundreds of millions of unlettered media-steepers, then how bad can it be? We killed a lobster in our kitchen last night and my daughter cried for an hour. The Japanese, who used to be just about the fiercest people on earth, have become infatuated with cuddly, adorable cartoon characters. My own family—the people I know best—is divided about evenly between people who will probably read this essay and people who almost certainly won’t, and I can’t say for sure that one group is necessarily warmer, happier, or better-adjusted than the other.
MORLOCKS AND ELOI AT THE KEYBOARD
Back in the days of the command line interface, users were all Morlocks who had to convert their thoughts into alphanumeric symbols and type them in, a grindingly tedious process that stripped away all ambiguity, laid bare all hidden assumptions, and cruelly punished laziness and imprecision. Then the interface-makers went to work on their GUIs and introduced a new semiotic layer between people and machines. People who use such systems have abdicated the responsibility, and surrendered the power, of sending bits directly to the chip that’s doing the arithmetic, and handed that responsibility and power over to the OS. This is tempting, because giving clear instructions, to anyone or anything, is difficult. We cannot do it without thinking, and depending on the complexity of the situation, we may have to think hard about abstract things, and consider any number of ramifications, in order to do a good job of it. For most of us, this is hard work. We want things to be easier. How badly we want it can be measured by the size of Bill Gates’s fortune.
The OS has (therefore) become a sort of intellectual labor-saving device that tries to translate humans’ vaguely expressed intentions into bits. In effect we are asking our computers to shoulder responsibilities that have always been considered the province of human beings—we want them to understand our desires, to anticipate our needs, to foresee consequences, to make connections, to handle routine chores without being asked,
But that is not where I’m going with this. The situation I describe here could be bad, but doesn’t have to be bad and isn’t necessarily bad now.
It simply is the case that we are way too busy, nowadays, to comprehend everything in detail. And it’s better to comprehend it dimly, through an interface, than not at all. Better for ten million Eloi to go on the Kilimanjaro Safari at Disney World than for a thousand cardiovascular surgeons and mutual fund managers to go on “real” ones in Kenya. The boundary between these two classes is more porous than I’ve made it sound. I’m always running into regular dudes—construction workers, auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoots in general—who were largely aliterate until something made it necessary for them to become readers and start actually thinking about things. Perhaps they had to come to grips withalcoholism, perhaps they got sent to jail, or came down with a disease, or suffered a crisis in religious faith, or simply got bored. Such people can get up to speed on particular subjects quite rapidly. Sometimes their lack of a broad education makes them overapt to go off on intellectual wild-goose chases, but hey, at least a wild-goose chase gives you some exercise. The spectre of a polity controlled by the fads and whims of voters who actually believe that there are significant differences between Bud Lite and Miller Lite, and who think that professional wrestling is for real, is naturally alarming to people who don’t. But then countries controlled via the command line interface, as it were, by double-domed intellectuals, be they religious or secular, are generally miserable places to live.
Sophisticated people deride Disneyesque entertainments as pat and saccharine, but if the result of that is to instill basically warm and sympathetic reflexes, at a preverbal level, into hundreds of millions of unlettered media-steepers, then how bad can it be? We killed a lobster in our kitchen last night and my daughter cried for an hour. The Japanese, who used to be just about the fiercest people on earth, have become infatuated with cuddly, adorable cartoon characters. My own family—the people I know best—is divided about evenly between people who will probably read this essay and people who almost certainly won’t, and I can’t say for sure that one group is necessarily warmer, happier, or better-adjusted than the other.
MORLOCKS AND ELOI AT THE KEYBOARD
Back in the days of the command line interface, users were all Morlocks who had to convert their thoughts into alphanumeric symbols and type them in, a grindingly tedious process that stripped away all ambiguity, laid bare all hidden assumptions, and cruelly punished laziness and imprecision. Then the interface-makers went to work on their GUIs and introduced a new semiotic layer between people and machines. People who use such systems have abdicated the responsibility, and surrendered the power, of sending bits directly to the chip that’s doing the arithmetic, and handed that responsibility and power over to the OS. This is tempting, because giving clear instructions, to anyone or anything, is difficult. We cannot do it without thinking, and depending on the complexity of the situation, we may have to think hard about abstract things, and consider any number of ramifications, in order to do a good job of it. For most of us, this is hard work. We want things to be easier. How badly we want it can be measured by the size of Bill Gates’s fortune.
The OS has (therefore) become a sort of intellectual labor-saving device that tries to translate humans’ vaguely expressed intentions into bits. In effect we are asking our computers to shoulder responsibilities that have always been considered the province of human beings—we want them to understand our desires, to anticipate our needs, to foresee consequences, to make connections, to handle routine chores without being asked,
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