Nerdshit

by Howard Reingold

For the past twenty years, I’ve thought, written, and talked about the way computers interact with minds, societies, and reality. Because I’ve lived in the place and during the era in which Silicon Valley and cyberculture emerged, I’ve been able to chronicle the microchip’s transformation of human thought, culture, and, governance as a participant observer. The mind, community, and civilization that have been changing as I’ve described them are my own mind, community, and civilization. As the technologies I’ve used and studied have grown more powerful, as my creative and professional work have become more enmeshed in PCs, online communities, and mobile phones, and as the use of microprocessor-based devices has changed fundamental aspects of the human world, my own attitudes about these technosocial changes have undergone an evolution. My opinions about the potential and danger of the always-on, smartifact-saturated, hyper-mediated, pervasively surveilled world we’re building have grown darker and more complex over the years.

I first used electronic tools to explore consciousness in the late 1960s. While I was in graduate school, studying neurophysiology, I worked with an electrical engineer to build a portable biofeedback machine. In 1968, brain researcher Joe Kamiya showed that the brainwaves of Zen monks were characterized by “alpha waves,” and that people were able to train themselves to produce more alpha waves by listening to an audible tone linked to a brainwave-measuring device. In my graduate school, the electroencephalograph (EEG) was the size of a refrigerator. The engineer I worked with managed to fit a transistorized version of an EEG machine into a box less than half the size of a small refrigerator. And then one day in the early 1970s he fit it all in the palm of his hand by using a new gizmo called an “operational amplifier” that put hundreds of transistors into a single chip. I didn’t realize at the time that I was witnessing the launch of Moore’s law.

I started writing professionally in 1973, using the kind of portable mechanical typewriter that writers had used for most of the 20th century. Buying my first electric typewriter was a big deal. Then there were correcting typewriters. I could swap out the typewriter’s printing ribbon cartridge for a correcting cartridge, then type over a mistake and cover it with white ink. When the microprocessor came along, I read about a company in New Mexico that would send you a home computer kit. You could make your own personal computer, enter programs by flipping switches, and make lights blink with your answers. When the Apple I came along in 1976, I began to hear rumors that people were finding ways to use computers to write on television screens. You could erase, correct, and move words and paragraphs automatically. The idea that such a thing was possible set me off on an investigation that never ended.

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