Engineers
There's a documentary out now about Tom Dowd, a recording engineer. The guy lights up when he talks about music and when he talks about technology. He tells us that he was completely mystified when he first heard recordings by Les Paul, because Paul was playing four or five guitar parts at once. Les Paul had figured out how to do multi-track recording, and Tom Dowd had to be there.
Dowd went out and put together one of the first eight-track machines in the world. Ten years later, he was still way ahead of everyone else; he invented sliders for multi-track recordings; at the time, the Beatles were recording in (at the most) three tracks. There's this great reunion scene with Ray Charles, where Dowd and Charles tell each other how tricky technology used to be, laughing hard.
What was great about Tom Dowd, who died in 2002, is that he had a close, deeply musical rapport with the artists he recorded, and an equally close rapport with the machines he tinkered with. He could talk about the past – he was there — but he wasn't longing for it. In fact, he loved the flexibility and creativity of capturing sound digitally and manipulating every wave.
Here's the question: do the founding engineers of the internet have the same feeling about the future that Tom Dowd did? Many of them are still alive. Are they excited about what will be possible as more of life moves online? Or do they long for the early days, when they knew almost everyone online and hooking in another university was tremendously exciting? Do they think of the internet as a social place, or as a place that's been wrecked by commerce? Do they feel a Dowd-like kinship with the people using the network, or do they feel overrun and ignored?
And who's doing the documentary? Maybe EFF should do it. Or a perceptive blogger. Or someone who can explain to us how things work. The internet of the future will thank us.