The Digital Imprimatur
John Walker,
Sept 25, 2003
On a bright sping day in 1995 as I was surfing around the new world that was the web, I encountered a page with a simple message: "Something wonderful is going to happen!" The sentence is from Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End and is the harbinger (in the book) of the evolution of humanity into a new, enlightened age. The web page author's intent was to say the same thing about today's human, the web being the vehicle through which this global revolution would happen. That was eight years ago. This is today: "...a road map of precisely how I believe that could be done, potentially setting the stage for an authoritarian political and intellectual dark age global in scope and self-perpetuating, a disempowerment of the individual which extinguishes the very innovation and diversity of thought which have brought down so many tyrannies in the past." Me, I still cling, hoping against hope, to the "something wonderful is going to happen" meme, an idea that is increasingly difficult to justify. I believe that the internet could usher in a global renaissance, if we would only let it. Ah, if we could only let it.
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