A Brief History of Information Technology

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There was once a time before clocks, when

humans had to rely on the movement of the sun and stars in order to track the progress of time. Each place had its own unique time, defined by the season, the weather, the length of the day.  In the darkness, we drew close to one another and to fire, which kept the light going even when the days were short and cold. We turned to stone and wood for refuge against the frigid wind. We slowed our heart rates and our pace, conserving our energy like bears in hibernation, trusting that this moment in the cycle would pass, and gradually the days would become longer.  Eventually the Earth reawakened, and so did we, to hunt and gather and make ourselves busy outside.

At some point, humans placed themselves at the center of time, rather than nature.  We constructed railroads to connect our villages together, and the trains needed to run on time, so we built clocks in each town to replace the church bells, and invented time zones to keep them in sync.  And the time tables of the trains determined when we had to plant and harvest, because the markets in the connected towns also had to run on time.  And soon the schedule for the markets dictated when the animals should have their babies and in turn, that dictated when the humans had theirs, and that dictated who and when the humans got married and where they lived.

The trains also carried letters from town to town, but people thought that was too slow and unpredictable, so they invented automobiles and planes to carry messages. But even planes weren’t fast enough for us, and telephones took up too much time, with all that talking. 

As this happened, we began to lose faith in ourselves – in our memories, the accuracy of the facts we retained, the books we had read, the names and faces of acquaintances and friends and love ones, our ability to make choices about how we spent our time. We didn’t trust ourselves anymore, so invented machines that could think better and faster to supplement our brains.  The machines could retain all of the names and dates and facts that we struggled to pull to the surface in our conversations, and they kept track of every detail. 

But we weren’t just looking for something that would crunch numbers and store data.  We wanted something we could play chess with!  We wanted a revolution! So, we invented machines that could communicate for us.  So, we learned to build neural networks that allowed computers to talk to one another, just like our brains used to do through our mouths.

The internet connected the world instantly, and that gave way to electronic mail and calendars. Soon, we were able to do away with most of the talking and just typed all day – clickety, clickety, click – whenever we had a new thought or idea that we wanted to share with someone.  Type once, distribute everywhere!

All of this made time more important because everything had to happen faster, and as the messages sped up, so did the volume of them coming in.  Soon, we were spending our lives chained to our keyboards, typing and digesting what others had types, and reacting to it all.  We needed to be able to take it with us, these computer brains that we’d come to rely on, so that we could continue using them when we weren’t sitting at our desks.  And the next thing you know, someone invented a computer that you could put in your pocket.  And they called it … a phone!  Soon, we found that couldn’t stop texting and clicking and typing and pinging, even to use the bathroom, so we started taking our phones with us. 

But instead of freeing us up from the keyboard, these phones just made the volume increase even more, so, we had to start utilizing multiple screens at once to keep up with everything.  Before long, it took too much time away from the keyboard to find food or buy trash bags, so we started using our phones to order them to be delivered to us. That way we could spend more time on our screens.  But some people were concerned that we might not be productive enough, so they invented Slack and Zoom and Notion and Loom, and suddenly everything had to happen right now, in “real time.”  And when the winter came, instead of huddling together around the fire, we sat in front of our screens, typing furiously, as though our lives depended upon it.

We soon became slaves to our machines and couldn’t do without them.  We needed them to shop, travel, and do practically everything we needed to do to survive.  So, the guy who delivered all of our stuff to us wrapped in layers of cardboard and bubble wrap came up with a better idea – why not just implant computer chips in our palms, and that way we would always have them with us when we needed them (and his company and the government could keep track of everything we did).