The frontier between us

but computer science would become a centerpiece of pop-culture? Who imagined that while at the supermarket checkout counter one would be able to buy magazines with articles on caches and dithering? Or that Unix path punctuation would become a vernacular element of advertising (in the form of Web addresses)? The biggest surprise from the first 50 years of computers is that computation turns out to be a cultural object in its own right, with all its warts and semicolons. Many a visionary had imagined that computers and networks would have a transformative effect on culture, but it was usually assumed the nasty details would become invisible as their influence increased. It is still part of the marketing orthodoxy of the computer industry that hardware and software must in some misty future become “consumer products,” as unobtrusive as toasters. And yet people love to obsess about the insides of their computers. Children who build elaborate Web pages in HTML and Java routinely burn toast. The public has often warmed to the surface of science and engineering, but never before to the depth. While there are tens of millions of people who love dinosaurs and black holes, how many of them have gone on a dig or analyzed spectrum data? When it comes to computers, though, a mass culture of technical literacy is being born, especially among children. We always thought computers had to become popularized, and instead the public has decided to become surprisingly technical. This is due in part to the stalwart marketing of awkward software by Microsoft, and in part to the economic pressures favoring open systems, which will always have rougher edges. But those cannot be the only reasons. There is an emotional draw. Maybe it’s the ability to control a microworld that is more predictable and less filled with pain and ambiguity than real life. An abstract aquarium, a theater of numbers. Whatever the reason, I would want to celebrate the public’s embrace of computer arcana, except for one thing. The material itself is unrelentingly ugly. I want to cry when I see those toast-burning kids endlessly tweaking HTML source code. This is the kind of soulJaron Lanier