Things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” complained Ralph Waldo Emerson a century and a half ago. Like his disciple and Concord neighbor Henry David Thoreau, Emerson was vexed by the ironies of modern history. Technologies of the kind that had ushered in the industrial revolution were intended to free the men and women of the modern world—from poverty, from bondage to servile labor, and from subjection to the vagaries of nature. But instead, Emerson, Thoreau, and others feared, technology had brought bondage of a new kind.
To Emerson and Thoreau, technology mastered its users in several ways, not least significantly through its capacity to fascinate people with means rather than ends. Long before Albert Einstein made his pithy remark about the modern age being an era of perfected means and confused ends, Emerson and Thoreau had identified the problem. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” Thoreau observed, “but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate . . . . We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic . . . ; but perchance the first news that will leak through the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” If Thoreau had such misgivings about the telegraph, what would he have thought about trucking down the information superhighway or about channel- surfing his way through the five hundred stations beamed down from the heavens to his cabin on the banks of Walden Pond?
