The anxiety peddlers never ask, Would you give up your laptop to preserve 150,000 jobs at IBM? Do you wish the Mac had never been invented? If you could, would you wipe out desktop publishing, saving not only all those IBMers but also untold numbers of typesetters and paste-up artists?
The personal-computer revolution, like the industrial revolution, is not a natural disaster, though it may feel like one to those whose jobs it flooded out. It is, like the transportation revolution that made possible oranges in Chicago, a technological response to the desires of millions for a better life.
Those desires do not please our social critics. In an age of mass production, they railed about the alienation of the worker. Now they complain about the service economy and the shortage of high-paid, workingmen’s jobs even as they denounce frivolous consumption and planet-threatening growth. They long for dark, satanic mills.
It is easy to be nostalgic for the world we have lost, easier still when voters can be bought with nostalgia for the jobs they once held. But the age of discontinuity, too, recalls earlier ages. It asks a familiarsounding question: Are we better off than we were 100 years ago? Who was right– the farmer or the fair?
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