Technology, they said, was going to make our lives easier. All those utopias forecast back in the '50s and the '60s were heavily dependent on technology to make them come true. (This was before things like Vietnam and the assassinations of the brothers Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Kent State and so on made the whole idea of a utopia any time soon pretty laughable.) The Lie of Technology
You have to be an old guy like me to remember, but the promise of technology was that it would give us oodles of free time. With the advent of exciting new machines like the photocopier, and the telex, and affordable long-distance phone service, businesses of all kinds would be much more efficient than they ever were. The work that used to take all week could now be accomplished in just a couple of days! The five-day weekend was just over the horizon, technology promised.
It would be the same everywhere else. Automation, new machines, even robots -- they would make everything from car manufacturing to steel plants to vacuuming the house a snap. No one would have to work all day, six days a week. Technology would set them free to relax, to read, to improve their minds, to take up a hobby, or to just sit around and enjoy the fruits of technology's labors.
And technology, if anything, has gotten even better. Now we've got fax machines, and overnight delivery services, and the Internet. Your car today pretty much is built by robots. Workers today are handling more data, channeling . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: June 11, 1999
Copyright © 1999 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to [email protected].
