Sublime

Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete. But the age of digital revolution — the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence — threatens an especially comprehensive cull. It's forcing the human race into what evolutionary

The application of history does have limits when it comes to informing the present. Just as it is frequently a mistake to claim something is “unprecedented,” it is equally mistaken to think there is nothing new under this century’s rising red sun.

In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.

In 1997, anticipating the vast potential of online teaching, Peter Drucker even proclaimed that the traditional college campus would become as obsolete by 2020 as the typewriter and the quill pen.

Like breathless techno-optimism, breathless techno-catastrophism is easy to dismiss as a twisted, misguided form of hype unsupported by the historical record.

As Internet consultant Clay Shirky said, “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure.”