July 1945, the engineer Vannevar Bush—one of the founders of the Raytheon electronics corporation, and director of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II—published a meditative essay in The Atlantic. The scientific community had mobilized during the war to develop the atomic bomb. Now, he urged, it should turn itself with the same energy to the organization of human knowledge. He envisioned a device that may seem eerily familiar today: a desklike piece of furniture he dubbed the “memex,” which would make available and searchable all the accumulated written works of humanity, compressing entire encyclopedias and scientific libraries into a few square inches, and serving as an “enlarged intimate supplement” to individual memory. The memex, Bush suggested, could enliven people under the shadow of nuclear destruction: It would enable humanity to access the tremendous record of human experience, and direct it toward a shared common good.
How far the grim news from today's technological frontier seems from Bush's optimism. Amazon is rife with counterfeit and fakery. Facebook has been blamed for the dissemination of conspiracy theories and ethnic hatreds, and for allowing user data to be manipulated to influence elections. Uber can't turn a profit even as its “gig economy” model undermines the notion of the steady job. YouTube's algorithms sway restless young people to the most extreme racist right. Hand-held computers link us to the massive tech giants lurking in the background. There's a whole genre of first-person essay about trying, and failing, to break addiction to the iPhone.
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