Markoff and Waldrop: Dreaming
Mitchell Waldrop's “The Dream Machine” and John Markoff's “What the Dormouse Said” are both enormously exciting books about the origins of personal computing. Both describe in loving detail the lives of people who believed in the transformative power of interactive human-driven electronic environments. (And Markoff unforgettably connects countercultural mid-Peninsula 1960s life to to the development of graphical interfaces.)
We need to do some succession planning — or maybe just some succession PR. The people described by Waldrop and Markoff were fearless and open to suggestion; they had enormous imaginations; and they didn't care what anyone thought about what they were doing. Now people talk about the internet as either (1) utterly predictable and boring, or (2) full of danger and darkness. Both of these rather smug approaches to electronic interaction lack imagination. And they point towards a constrained electronic future.
This isn't a plea to return to the past. Instead, it's a reminder that sometimes it's a good idea to just do things. Go ahead – today – and build something useful and imaginative. People will write about you later.
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