Sublime

Technology tends to represent a thrust toward the future, an accelerated promise of microrefined systems and networks, deeper probes into the way we live and think. Technology claims the future on our behalf.

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Our natural reaction is to seek out culture that embraces

Up to that point, publishers considered their readers to be their customers, and saw their goal as providing a product good enough to convince people to pay to read it. Day’s innovation was to realize that his readers could become his product and the advertisers his customers.

He regularly invited top computer scientists to his office to explain emerging trends in hardware and software. He had three home computers. He was typing a future bestseller, Earth in the Balance, on an early laptop. He went to computer-industry conferences, wrote articles for Scientific American, and fluently spoke the language of VLSI and AI,

See the connection between the oral tradition and our new digital landscape? Ideas today are never fixed: they’re owned and modified by everyone. They move through networks at the will of their members and without that activity, they die. That’s the digitoral era emerging.

The earliest experiments in online community had an odd gravitational pull, for whatever reason, for Grateful Dead fans. Community Memory, the first digital bulletin board, was installed in a Berkeley record store in 1973 and was tightly intertwined with the California counterculture—it was dedicated to the sharing of art and literature, and full