Having been a computer scientist since the 1980s, I am usually troubled by the media’s use of the term “technology,” or as in the case of Brooke Masters, “Big Tech” (“Three ways Big Tech got it wrong,” Opinion, December 29 ).
And while Masters’ essay is one of the best I’ve come across, it suffers from the critical and persistent mimetic error of perceiving the Internet and the World Wide Web as “technical” rather than child’s play, when anyone today can create a website together on their own in an hour with all the website building software available.
We see current technology at Nasa and Cern and the aviation industry, for example. Elon Musk and Facebook may make interesting business reading, but they are trivial examples of people or companies using other people’s software to subvert human civilization in the case of Twitter, and are but examples of what passes for mainstream technology in the world. today.
Michael Ayres
San Francisco, CA, USA
