An Insight

"institutions were captured by a small number of radicals...because the elites running the institutions didn’t have a clue how to stand up to the incoming wave of moral cant, guilt-tripping, and bullying from younger and differently socialised generations"https://t.co/rYPk4Kuy8Z

— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) April 6, 2023

 

I see wonderful things

Some mushrooms glow, and it's because the light emitted from those fungi attracts the attention of insects, including beetles, flies, wasps, and ants. Those insect visitors are apparently good for the fungi because they spread the fungal spores around https://t.co/Dm628XUUxI pic.twitter.com/0xtju8XKuu

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 4, 2023

 

Offbeat Humor

pic.twitter.com/d7Sqs7mYjL

— place where cat shouldn't be (@catshouldnt) April 30, 2023

 

Out of Time

On Board Ship

by C. P. Cavafy

It’s like him, of course,

this little pencil portrait.

 

Hurriedly sketched, on the ship’s deck,

the afternoon magical,

the Ionian Sea around us.

 

It’s like him. But I remember him as better looking.

He was sensitive almost to the point of illness,

and this highlighted his expression.

He appears to me better looking

now that my soul brings him back, out of Time.

 

Out of Time. All these things are from very long ago—

the sketch, the ship, the afternoon.

I love those last two lines.  So many things increasingly seem out of time, from very long ago . . . the sketch, the ship, the afternoon, and so much more unmentioned.  

Keep researching till we get the answer we want

Oh, my goodness, I hadn't seen this issue for what seems like a few years.  It pops its head up and gets some attention and then seems to go dormant.  But that is simply an outsider's perspective.  Perhaps among medical doctors and public health officials it has been ever-present since I first heard the argument made some four decades ago.  The core claim is that African American's receive inferior health treatment owing to racial animus by white health professionals.

It is both a perfectly logical claim to make and a difficult one to prove.

On the logic side, we have the fact that there is a deep history of disparate medical access, treatment and outcomes.  We still have some areas where there are disparate outcomes.  Of course, still on the side of logic but against the argument, we have the fact that disparate racial treatment has been consequentially illegal for nearly sixty years and you rarely (or never) see doctors or medical establishments being sued for disparate treatment.  Further, it is not uncommon for medical practitioners and establishments to support charity or mission type services or trips to Haiti or Africa or similar destinations.  Accusations of racial animus are not necessarily incompatible with such behavior but are certainly inconsistent with such behavior.

While proving racial animus would be exceptionally difficult, one might think that proving inferior treatment due to animus might be easier.

One might think, but as is usual with complex systems (and health is certainly a complex system) nothing is ever obvious.

If we are going to focus on Race as a subordinate attribute, then there are all sorts of other variables which we need to control.  Income, class, occupation, morbidity, age, education attainment,  diet, etc.  All need to be controlled in order to demonstrate that the differences in outcome might arise from the racial variable.  

Since I first became aware of this argument in the late seventies or early eighties, income, class, morbidity, and diet have all been the confounding variables which have made it difficult to prove that African Americans are receiving the inferior health care owing to racial animus owing to white practitioners.  

Perhaps the claim is true but it certainly feels like there is a huge victim advocacy industry sector to support for whom the claim needs to be true rather than obvious and clear empirical evidence that it is in fact a true argument.

Prescription for Failure by Stanley Goldfarb is merely the most recent update I occasionally come across.  In this case the evidence is against the argument.  The subheading is Researchers are ignoring studies on race and medicine that yield ideologically inconvenient results.

Data Talks

Liberal women are roughly 4x as censorious as conservative men. https://t.co/cO3BzZAURt

— Wilfred X. Reilly, Californian (@wil_da_beast630) April 10, 2023

 

They couldn’t imagine anything more suffocating or tedious than old time religion; but they were wrong.

From 40 years on, Life of Brian has made the world a darker place by Toby Young.  This is from 2019.  

I went to the Battle of Ideas at the Barbican last weekend, a free speech festival organised by the Brexit party MEP Claire Fox, and listened to an interesting discussion about Life of Brian. The Monty Python film is exactly 40 years old, having been released in the UK on 8 November 1979.

The opinion of the panel, made up of comedians and intellectuals, was that its lampooning of rigid, orthodox thinking is more relevant today than ever, since we’re in the midst of a new wave of puritanism, albeit one inspired by left-wing identity politics rather than Christianity. After all, what is ‘hate speech’ if not a type of blasphemy?

When I got home I watched the famous TV debate between John Cleese, Michael Palin, Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood, then the Bishop of Southwark, which is on YouTube. It’s worth viewing for the old-fashioned put-downs alone. ‘Now I wasn’t in the least bit horrified,’ says Stockwood, who’d been to a BBC screening just beforehand. ‘People said, “Oh now, Bishop, when you go there you’ll be absolutely horrified,” but I wasn’t at all. After all, I wasn’t vicar of the University Church for nothing. I’m familiar with undergraduate humour. And I’m also the governor of a mentally deficient school and once I was a prep-school master, so I felt frightfully at home.’

The consensus is that the young Turks got the better of the two elderly Christians — and that was certainly my view when I watched the debate in 1979 aged 16. But seeing it again, I was struck by how callow the liberal pieties of Cleese and Palin sounded. They maintained that the satirical target of Life of Brian wasn’t just Christianity, but all forms of received wisdom. What they objected to was the idea that we should take anything on faith, particularly a belief system with a strong moral component — and Cleese cited Marxism as another example. Rather, we should resist the gravitational pull of all these doctrines — whether embodied in the Church of England or the Judean People’s Front — and work things out for ourselves.

I believed that 40 years ago, but it’s hard to get around the fact that the rapid decline of Christianity in Britain and America in the intervening period has not led to a new age of enlightenment. On the contrary, we appear to be in the grip of various secular belief systems that are far more dogmatic than modern Christianity. Turns out, the Pythons were naive in thinking that mankind’s yearning for religious faith was an aspect of our nature we could outgrow. The ebbing away of the Christian tide has left a God-shaped hole in the Anglosphere and it has been filled with something more sinister — a constantly mutating moral absolutism. Its latest manifestation is Extinction Rebellion, but no doubt it will be something even more fanatical and millenarian in a few years’ time. These quasi-religious movements resemble Christianity in its fundamentalist, pre-Reformation period when believers were less willing to forgive heretics and sinners.

The irony of Life of Brian is that by lampooning Christian beliefs for perfectly honourable reasons, the makers of the film contributed to the demise of the church’s authority and that, in turn, created a vacuum that has been filled by far more egregious examples of the closed mindset they objected to. The Pythons didn’t realise it 40 years ago, but the muscular Christianity that had been drummed into them at their private schools and which they hated with a kind of life-defining passion was acting as a bulwark against less organised forms of irrationality. They couldn’t imagine anything more suffocating or tedious than that ‘vast, moth-eaten musical brocade’; but they were wrong.

The dismissal of established wisdom (from folklore to formal religion) has always been one of the more unpleasant aspects of public intellectuals.  Fine if they want to be atheists but it always feels as if atheists are the most religiously motivated of rationalists.  It is not enough for them to choose to be unbelievers.  They have to argue with everyone else to be unbelievers as well.  And when I say argue, I really mean, from observation, they seem to believe that insulting the religious is the best means of converting them to unbelief.

More than that, as Young is alluding to, the bien pensant never accord to religions the value of moral structure they provide to the population at large.  

It is quite one thing to be financially privileged and/or meticulously educated and end up naively pursuing ultra-rationalism into a nihilistic atheism in the belief that there is time and support to create a new and robust ethical worldview without any of the accrued wisdom embedded in the world's major religions.  And, of course, the implied ego of those who stray down this path is monstrous.  

But the reality is that for most people, most of the time, under most conditions, there simply is not the time time nor the resources to do such a thing.  For most people, there is no safety net and they have to be productively useful from the very beginning.  Far, far easier to work off the existing structure of a religion and make minor modifications and accommodations than it is to pretend to create something usefully true from the ground up.

The bien pensant are among the most ignorant of those who walk among us.  Bright, glib, and entertaining they might be but they are low wattage in terms of wisdom.  

Spring in Gościeradz, 1933 by Leon Wyczółkowski (Polish, 1852-1936)

Spring in Gościeradz, 1933 by Leon Wyczółkowski (Polish, 1852-1936)

Click to enlarge.

A status-and-social-leverage strategy is a form of collective narcissism; a means to redistribute status

What a pleasure to come across a thoughtful piece which gives you new ways of framing something, advances ideas with which you can sympathetically agree but also advances arguments with which you might disagree. 

A piece which forces serious engagement and that engagement returns advantages.

Such is A better future versus the transformative future by Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby.  The subheading is Degrading the bargaining politics of human flourishing: I. 

The core idea with which I am intrigued is woven across their essay and therefore hard to extract from their larger argument.  

I will attempt to do so in their own words below.  In my own reformulation, I would put forward the following argument in my words but with some of their concepts.  

The Classical Liberal Age of Enlightenment (CLAE) yielded an ever-expanding Emancipation Sequence.  At the heart of the Classical Liberal Age of Enlightenment radical experiment is a belief in a knowable world (scientific method) made up of individual people all of whom have equal inalienable natural rights which include property, speech, assembly, religion, etc..  The core experiment was (and is) the effort to birth a new world through consent of the governed in which all these precepts were realized for everyone to the fullest degree possible.  

The challenge facing Classical Liberal Age of Enlightenment thinkers was how to transition from a past world dominated by myth, superstition, violent domination, forcible governance by the few of the many into the realized Classical Liberal Age of Enlightenment model of free individuals exercising their natural rights for their own benefit via the marketplaces of ideas, property, risk, capital, etc.  

A central success of that transition has been the Emancipation Sequence.  From Dale and Warby:

The Emancipation Sequence

The politics of the transformative future are profoundly different from standard attempts to do better.

In many ways, Western societies have been doing better for centuries. We can identify an Emancipation Sequence marching through Western (especially Anglo) history: abolition of the slave trade, then of slavery; Catholic emancipation in the Anglican United Kingdom; Jewish emancipation; adult male suffrage; women’s suffrage; equal opportunities for women; civil rights in the US, and finally gay and lesbian equality.

The common element in these widenings of legal equality and political participation is that each step in the sequence was not about social transformation. It was about being included, about a place at the table. The basic claim was “we want to have the legal and social standing to participate in society that you have”.

This claim did not depend on some elevated valorisation of the to-be-included group, merely an appeal to a common humanity. Indeed, both Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi regularly criticised failings among those on whose behalf they spoke.

Again and again, this appeal to a common humanity was powerful and persuasive. Every single advance in the Emancipation Sequence came from successfully convincing folk who were not from the group seeking inclusion. Most obviously, every single women’s movement advance came about by persuading men.

A persistent feature of human societies has been presumptive sex roles. It has always included cultural endorsement and management of the presumptive sex roles within each society or collection of societies. The speed of the success within Western societies in achieving legal equality—and the acceptance of women’s participation in all walks of life—is, in historical terms, astonishing.

In the case of the UK, the process started with the Married Women’s Property Act (1882). Most women were granted the right to vote at the same time as all adult men were, in 1918. By 2015, a survey in the UK found that 84 per cent of men and 81 per cent of women endorsed equal opportunity for women. The concept of presumptive sex roles had become attenuated to the point of near complete disappearance.

To acknowledge the Emancipation Sequence and its successful inclusions is to undermine any division between the moral wonder of the imagined future and the moral perdition of the past or present. This is why those who promote the politics of the transformative future ignore or disparage that history and those successes.

The central argument is indisputably true.  Across the West, and certainly the Anglophone West, we have a 250 years expansion of rights and privileges from some protected core to virtually the entirety of society.  It has been empirically and morally an enormous victory.  Yes, it occurred in fits and starts, never smoothly, and with occasional backsliding here and there.  But the success of this entirely new way of viewing the world (CLAE) has been astonishing in its breadth and effectiveness.  And astonishing in terms of the consequent progress in terms of knowledge and prosperity.  They all go together, forming a Goldilocks ecology of prosperity.  

Failures are primarily in those areas of the world where the precepts of CLAE are not accepted in whole or in part.  Places where recidivism to authoritarianism and totalitarian control remain a reality.  

The Emancipation Sequence in the context of, and via the nature of Classical Liberal Age of Enlightenment ideas has been an astonishing success.  And it has always been predicated on the idea that all individuals have equal rights which are protected through the rule of law and the equality of all before the law.  

What is strange in the past thirty or so years has been the emergence of victim movements which do not wish to avail themselves of the benefits of CLAE but which wish to achieve privileged moral or material positions within a fundamentally transformed social structure.  

I am inclined to interpret these victim movements via the Gramscian lens of totalitarian offspring of always persistent Marxist ideologies.  Certainly, most of the individuals involved in these victim movements speak some Marxist patois with more or less explicit ideological descent from the Original Gangster Marx.  

Dale and Warby are offering an alternative way to view the emergence of Victim Movements.  I do not dismiss it.  It warrants consideration but there is much to consider.

The two primary victim groups so far have been racial victim groups (via Critical Race Theory) and gender victim groups (via Feminist Theory).  They have recently been joined by the probably passing transgender victim group.

I look at each of these as mere manifestations of remnant Marxism in its various guises. 

Dale and Warby note:

Those who endorse the politics of the transformative future seek to claim the Emancipation Sequence’s moral lustre, particularly that of the civil rights movement, while rejecting its underlying principles and devaluing its achievements. It also regularly eschews the politics of open political bargaining—which, after all, might not go the way you want—for the non-electoral politics of institutional capture.

[snip]

This politics of institutional capture intimidates, seeking to destroy careers while censoring dissent. Dissent from the moral project is taken to be either malfeasance or the tacit endorsement or facilitation of evil. This view of dissent rejects the bargaining politics that is inherent to democratic process and parliamentary politics.

The politics of the transformative future is not about doing better within society as it is. It is about transcending that society and its heritage. It creates such a conceptual and moral gap between what is, what has been, and what ought to be, that the transformational future become endless fodder for status-and-social-leverage strategies. The problem with having practical aims—such as legal equality—is that such aims come with end-points.

I am good with those arguments and observations.

Dale and Warby in this essay are mostly focused on explicating their argument via the gender victim movement, i.e. recent versions of feminism.

Feminism is where the politics of inclusion—of the Emancipation Sequence—came to be distorted and derailed. It’s where the sequence went past “we want what you have too, because we are human” to systematic self-valorisation based on drawing a moral distinction between groups (specifically, between men and women).

We are now seeing explicit rejection of equal opportunity.

Feminism’s fundamental problem is one of differentiation. If there is no profound moral distinction to be made between men and women, what is the point of feminism? Liberal feminism just becomes liberalism, socialist feminism just becomes socialism, and so on.

Feminism has thus openly valorised its own group. This is not a feature of previous inclusion movements. Feminism spoke as though, somehow, patriarchal constraints throughout history had turned women into a finer form of Homo sapien. This valorisation entailed denigration of men and masculinity.

This combination of denigration and valorisation is antipathetic to the politics of bargaining of electoral politics but well-suited to the politics of institutional capture through piety display*, intimidation and censorship. So, the more feminism comes to lean on moral distinction—and the less it becomes about practical politics—the more it shifts to the politics of institutional capture.

This is where they begin to address something which is notable and yet seemingly under-discussed.  I suspect that in the West, especially the Anglophone West, there remains an enormous commitment to the equal rights agenda of CLAE.  Yet in these heartlands of CLAE, we see these victimhood movements reverting to the old arguments of privilege - we deserve a superior position because of . . . (race, class, gender, language, religion, gender, etc.)  

Why?  Dale Warby have an answer.

The more genuinely gender-egalitarian society becomes, the fewer legal or other barriers there are to women, the more feminism has to lean on making moral distinctions between men and women. It’s no longer about getting rid of various barriers, about the practical politics of inclusion as per the Emancipation Sequence, about investing in parliamentary politics and open persuasion. Instead, it becomes a status-and-social-leverage strategy.

The tendency to self-valorise women at times becomes a form of collective narcissism (“believe all women”, which permits conviction by accusation). Feminism has come to lean heavily on an updated version of the Victorian era cult of womanhood: that men are the brutes women have to civilise.

I am somewhat . . . dubious? But I don't disagree with what they are saying.  Hence the need to mull.  I agree and yet hesitate over the position.

Dale and Warby head off into different territory for a while before coming back to:

As part of group self-valorisation, feminism became the first movement in the Emancipation Sequence not to seek to generalise dignity, but to redistribute it so women have more than men. Seeking an unequal redistribution of dignity—of presumptive social standing—is now standard across social justice progressivism.

Indeed - that has been what has been so striking in the post 1970s Emancipation Sequence.  The emergence of some groups who seek not to increase everyone's access to equal rights and protections of the law but instead to create newly privileged groups.  

Then they head off into some biological woods for a while.  I don't inherently disagree with the arguments they are making but they make me somewhat nervous.

But enough said about that.  An excellent essay in making a provocative argument with a fresh framing.  

I really like the Emancipation Sequence, because it conforms so well with the substance of CLAE and because it so clearly maps to the actual sequence of historical events over the past 250 years.

Hopefully, we can move past this period of authoritarian revanchism characterized by the victimhood movements who seek to privilege themselves at the expense of everyone else, and which are in direct opposition to the CLAE agenda.  Whether they are simply revitalized Marxists or merely self-seeking provocateurs, this essay provides me more reason to have an atavistic aversion to those seeking to fundamentally transform culture/society/institutions etc.  They are mere authoritarian chancers seeking the hot opportunity for self-advantage.

The S-curve of change outstrips generational cohorts.

Oh, dear.  Aging is a process of dating oneself.  No, not that sort of dating. 

You read something or say something and then realize that the audience of today does not catch the reference, or worse, doesn't even understand the reference.  Can't, perhaps, understand the reference.  

Of course, that has always been the case.  Our challenge, and blessing, today is that the S-curve of change (the rate at which new technologies, ideas, concepts, systems, techniques, habits, styles, etc. are introduced and then completely adopted) has been steepening at the rate of Moore's Law for the past fifty years.  An idea, a regulation, a social norm, a technology, a style of music; they used to have a life span of perhaps twenty-five or fifty years or more.  Now, they are lucky to remain relevant for five to ten years.  

The upside to this reality is just astonishing levels of efficiency, effectiveness and productivity.  Reach back in to your own life for examples of activities you used to do routinely twenty or thirty years ago to find how many are either now done dramatically differently, or by dramatically different means, or are not done at all any longer because they are no longer relevant.  

Periodically thoroughly cleaning LPs - Gone!  Change for public telephones or parking meters - Gone!  Rotary dial phones - Gone!  Watching one of three TV channels according to their schedule - Gone!  Writing a letter, licking a stamp, mailing a letter - Gone!

All were mere steps along the path towards more and better choices and much higher productivity and therefore far greater prosperity.

It used to be one of the tragic characteristics of growing older was that there were ever fewer people from your cohort, fewer people who understood your age cohort's habits, norms, memories, and preferences.  You faced not only the normal insults of age with reduced capacity, strength, stamina, etc.  But as your peers faded away, you had fewer people who spoke to you in your vernacular.

It was not a critical loss but a sad one none-the-less.

And that cycle has always been age old.  There will always be a fixed cohort who lived through the first showing of Jaws (1975), just as there was a fixed cohort who lived through WWII (1939-1945), just as there was a fixed cohort who lived through the Black Death (1346-1351).  In each instance, fifty years after the event, there were few left who could speak as experienced peers with one another about the novelty and freshness of that event.

What has changed is the steepening of the S-curve, to a large extent driven by the underlying effect Moore's law, but the consequence of several other things as well.  What was once experienced over fifty years is now experienced over ten or even five years.  In this sense, people are living more and living more intensely than at any time in history.  They are cramming ever more into their three-score and ten than could have ever occurred in the past.  Not just volume of experience but novelty of experience.  

And they are living through more cycles of experience.  They have more memories.  And with more cycles of experience, there is also greater fragmentation.  Fewer people (as a percentage) who would have shared the same experience.  Fewer people to talk your talk, know your knowledge as you age.  

There are lots of possible implications if the premise is accepted.  Communities of shared bonds of memory and experience are probably stronger than otherwise.  I suspect that social norms and shared precepts will become more important over experiences as the possibility of cohorts of shared experience begin to become a thing of the past.

It has always been true that we are all individuals.  It has also always been true that it has been easy to see common patterns among individuals and for there to be an inclination to treat them as a group, a category, even when they are not.  

But that will become harder and harder as everyone becomes more and more unique as a portfolio of memories unreplicated among anyone else.  People who speak an experiential language of their own unique to themselves.

All this brought on by the accidental reading of a near half-century old article by James Fallows.

It started innocuously with his substack post, An Early Casualty in the AI Wars by James Fallows.  However, at the end of the article, he has this almost throwaway line:

David Pierce of The Verge has a story on the Neeva shutdown, here.

And, speaking of lost eras in computing, here is a story I wrote in The Atlantic 41 years ago, about what the advent of personal computing might mean. Some of it now seems as if it was from a prehistoric age. Some of it could have been written last night.

The link is to an article he wrote for the July 1982 edition of The Atlantic Magazine called Living with a Computer by James Fallows.  

Fallows is ten years older than I am.  He was 33 in 1982.  Married and with a well-launched career.  I was a newly graduated student from Georgetown, just starting out.  A little bit of work in the oil industry followed by an MBA from Wharton.  

At Lawrenceville (1976-1978) I had learned my first computer language, PL/1.  At Georgetown I picked up BASIC.  Somewhere in there I had some brief flirtation with C Programming Language.  

Fallows was trying to make these software and hardware things work for his own real world need while I was still treating them as academic subjects.  By Wharton, with Compaq, IBM, Lisa and then the Mac, the hardware side of the computer revolution was finally beginning to take shape alongside the software evolutions.  I was of the cohort that actually began introducing these new-fangled devices into offices and office-budgets.  Making them work not just for individuals (as Fallows was doing) but for the business as a whole.

The point is that I can read Living with a Computer and it is very real to me.  All the company names, the experiences, the disappointments, the wires spiraling everywhere, Radio Shack - oh, it brings back not just memories but a whole Broadway production of lived experiences.  I am there again.  I hear Fallows words speaking to me.  

I'd sell my computer before I'd sell my children. But the kids better watch their step. When have the children helped me meet a deadline? When has the computer dragged in a dead cat it found in the back yard?

The Processor Technology SOL-20 came into my life when Darlene went out. It was a bleak, frigid day in January of 1979, and I was finishing a long article for this magazine. The final draft ran for 100 pages, double-spaced. Interminable as it may have seemed to those who read it, it seemed far longer to me, for through the various stages of composition I had typed the whole thing nine or ten times. My system of writing was to type my way through successive drafts until their ungainliness quotient declined. This consumed much paper and time. In the case of that article, it consumed so much time that, as the deadline day drew near, I knew I had no chance of retyping a legible copy to send to the home office.

I turned hopefully to the services sector of our economy. I picked a temporary-secretary agency out of the phone book and was greeted the next morning by a gum-chewing young woman named Darlene. I escorted her to my basement office and explained the challenge. The manuscript had to leave my house by 6:30 the following evening. No sweat, I thought, now that a professional is on hand.

But five hours after Darlene's arrival, I glanced at the product of her efforts. Stacked in a neat pile next to the typewriter were eight completed pages. This worked out to a typing rate of about six and a half words per minute. In fairness to Darlene, she had come to a near-total halt on first encountering the word "Brzezinski" and never fully regained her stride. Still, at this pace Darlene and I would both be dead—first I'd kill her, then I'd kill myself—before she came close to finishing the piece. Hustling her out the door at the end of the day, with $49 in wages in her pocket and eleven pages of finished manuscript left behind, I trudged downstairs to face the typewriter myself. Twenty-four hours later, I handed the bulky parcel to the Federal Express man and said, "Never again."

That was his experience in 1979.  In 1984 I was president of the Entrepreneurial Club at Wharton, in my second year.  We had had a very profitable venture selling HP12C calculators to the new incoming first year class of MBAs.  We had a couple of other hustles going on.  One was . . . Well, what was it?  I don't really recall.  All I remember was that it entailed the transfer of a batch of information from some hardcopy source to an electronic file that was computer readable.  There was some sort of merge and manipulation in there somewhere.  Some value added information or something.  We expected to be able to sell the resulting database to our fellow students and possibly to a broader market.

Oh, but the challenges.  We had our own form of an upgraded Darlene.  He was a 16 year-old high school student there in Philadelphia.  He worked at an hourly.  His principle qualifications were 1) he was familiar with computers such as they existed at that time, 2) he knew enough technical talk to understand our project requirements, 3) he was willing to work at an affordable hourly rate, and 4) he was willing to do drudge data work.  

I undersell him.  He was actually bright, affable and eager.  But for us, his chief attraction was his affordability.  And the chief detraction was that his affordability was tied to his ability to fit this project in around his academic and athletic schedule.

Which led to a pattern which I came to know well in my tech career.  Be careful to keep the mean time of project implementation shorter than the mean time of technology change or mean time of customer demand change.  

It took a whole semester of pestering to finally get the data file and by the time we did, the opportunity we had seen was on its last legs.

The point though is that Fallows is describing experiences that only some small portion of the population experienced circa 1970-1985.   It was a momentous period and the absolute number of people were of course in their hundreds of thousands if not a million or two.  

But that very specific experience of making a new wave of technology work?  Not just work technologically, but work with people doing real world tasks.  Work in office environments where the finding of the On-button was a real barrier.  Work in the sense of being a line item on the annual business budget.  Work in the sense of replacing age-old processes (typing pool, secretaries, schedulers, copy machine managers, etc.) with machines and new processes. 

It happened once and then the revolution moved on.  Ever quicker as it turned out.  Each revolution involving fewer people directly, affecting ever more people indirectly, and each lasting a shorter time than before.

I am delighted to come across the article and be reminded that there are people out there who also knew about Osborne I, etc.  And to be reminded how it was in those challenging but heady days.  

Fallows ends his 1982 article with the hope "for a world in which my sons can grow up to have a better computer than their father had."  

Here we are in 2023 and it is an interesting question.  Did they have better computers than their father?  Of course!  Of course?  

Obviously computers perform every function performed in 1982 orders of magnitude better.  But are our computers better?  

There is a broader philosophical question which could almost not be conceived in 1982.  People like Niel Postman were thinking about it then but it wasn't well articulated.

We are three, four, five technological revolutions beyond 1982.  What actually constitutes a computer is now considered differently, and while the benefits for simple productivity tasks are obvious, we have moved way beyond simple productivity improvements.  We are looking and considering a range of risks and challenges that we could scarcely conceptualize forty-one years ago.

The S-curve of change is steeper.  It comes faster.  We fragment our experiences.  Our cohorts become smaller.  

The need for fundamental truths becomes clearer.  Truths that endure and do not change.