Life is pressuring us to live by the robots’ pleasures, I thought. Our appetites have given way to theirs. Robots aren’t becoming us, I feared; we ar… - Ellen Ullman

A democracy, indeed a culture, needs some sustaining common mythos. Yet, in a world where “truth” is a variable concept — where any belief can find its adherents — how can a consensus be formed? How can we arrive at the compromises that must underlie the workings of any successful society?

Somehow, even if it means laws and rules and governments, we must find our way back to the technologists’ dream of the internet, the free exchanges among millions of equals; the following of links to links, unobserved, as we desire; the personal web pages we created, of our own designs, defeating the domination of Microsoft’s and Apple’s standard human interfaces. We must go back to that internet, even if it existed for only a flickering moment, or never existed except in idylls and nostalgia. We must route around the new bad corporate net; or create a superset of it; or an alternative. Or something.

Computer science was then generally a subdepartment of electrical engineering,