ABSTRACT
If there is one common thread to the many discussions of what is called a technological fix, it is that those who proposed it did not think far enough to anticipate the side effects, the “unintended consequences,” (in Edward Tenner's phrase), or the true place for a technological innovation in the larger context of the society into which it is introduced. 2 When looking at the history of the invention and spread of the electronic digital computer, one finds many examples of optimistic projections of how the computer would solve any number of problems of society—projections that later on seem naive and obviously wrong. For example, in the 1950s a number of visionaries (not always engineers who were actually doing the work) spoke of the coming Utopia of full-time leisure brought on by automation: when “the push button age is already obsolete: the buttons now push themselves.” 3 The invention of the personal computer in the late 1970s elicited a similar set of predictions from what I call “Digital Utopians.” In both cases society was indeed transformed, even drastically, but the Utopia that was promised failed to appear.
