The Worm in the Apple

The question was posed to me this morning: “What is The most important invention in your lifetime?” Being a contrarian, I reply that it’s not the invention; it’s the use or abuse that is important. So what about computers?

Let’s talk about the underlying technology. It began modestly with Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and Ada Lovelace’s first programs to run it. From those formative ventures, it developed into large and uncanny machines.

As a graduate student, I lugged huge boxes of punched cards to feed into the machine’s maw. I hoped for answers to questions that statistics might answer. Just years before, you solved statistical equations manually ( and yes, that was how I first learned to solve them). Now, I waited for a printout of the answers in minutes.

But already, the worm had started to wriggle inside the apple. You can always depend upon people to find a way to alter technology to, shall we say, more interesting ends. Thus writing goes from epic poetry and literature to scrawled graffiti on the walls of Pompei – “I screwed a lot of girls here” or, “Phileros is a eunuch!”

In my time, programmers used the set of characters in ASCII to generate “art.” The piece of ASCII art that adorned my wall at home was a lovely rendering of a female television star in a revealing pose. Others were playing Battleship and Star Trek over the predecessor of the internet, the DARPA network. It took some skill to do this with the primitive acoustic modem of the day. But, hey, where there is a will, there was a way.

Once the general principles were out, there was no dilly-dallying around. A few years later, when I worked as an applied anthropologist, I ran sophisticated statistical programs on an Apple IIc. I was also playing Reach for The Stars, combating the dreaded Yokunian Empire, and my toddler was busy with an early educational program for child development.

The development of the internet allowed things to run wild. We no longer scrawled graffiti one at a time. Now, we could write large and almost universally. I could play the successor to Reach for the Stars with Randy in Seattle and Mike in Liverpool. The successors to ASCII art were much more realistic and salacious.

People pretend that the worm in the apple is new. But it’s been with us since Nuk discovered that the red icky stuff could be used on the cave wall to leave his handprint there. Then Tala played around with the idea. Soon, a herd of gazelle chased by band members was on the wall.

The next time you complain that technology gets abused, don’t blame the technology. Blame your underlying human nature that still likes to scrawll “Phileros is a eunuch!”