Personal computers (from which iPhones and their like are descended) might have remained a quaint, hobbyist idea had today’s commercial norms been in place in the 1970s. The idea was shaped to a great extent by political activists opposed to big business and the military,53 and the world of business scorned them until the first computer spreadsheet (the ‘magic piece of paper’ that recalculates your sums for you, when you change any of the figures) appeared in 1979. This was Dan Bricklin’s Visicalc, which he wrote for the Apple II computer, giving it a desperately needed foothold in the business market. Bricklin did not patent the spreadsheet idea – and could not have done until two years later, by which time the idea had been picked up by other software companies. The excitement about spreadsheets contributed to IBM’s hurried but decisive decision to enter the personal computer market in 1981.
When firms finally discovered the computer’s benefits, there was a competitive frenzy. As I will argue in later chapters, this led to a wholesale restructuring and concentration of the economy that somehow yielded very little beneficial effect on standards of living, but a great increase in human inequalities and impacts.
Many firms fell by the wayside along with whole areas of employment. So, too, did whole areas of technical possibility. As firms started to make money from selling computers, competitive development proceeded at such breakneck speed that attempts to open up new architectural possibilities were bypassed before they could be made ready for general use. We will look at some of these in later chapters.
Market forces effected a swift and radical simplification of what people thought of as ‘the computer’, forcing its development to be channelled along a single, very narrow path. As we will see, von Neumann architecture became the ‘only show in town’ – a development that would have made von Neumann himself despair, and which has had surprising environmental consequences. The rich diversity of technologies that characterized computing before that time evaporated, leaving a single, extremely inefficient technology to serve everything from mobile phones to audio equipment to financial markets. The computer revolution, which promised to enrich human lives and reduce human impacts, and could certainly have done so, in the event did the exact opposite.
1 ‘Another suicide at Foxconn after boss attempts damage control’, China Labour Bulletin, 27 May 2010, nin.tl/FoxconnCLB (retrieved 01/06/2010).
2 Nick Cohen, ‘How much do you really want an iPad?’ The Observer, 30 May 2010.
3 Milanovic, Williamson and Lindert, ‘Measuring Ancient Inequality’, NBER working paper, October 2007.
4 George Packer, ‘Change the World: Silicon Valley transfers its slogans – and its money – to the realm of politics’, The New Yorker, 27 May 2013.
5 Glynn Moody, Rebel Code: Linux And The Open Source Revolution. Basic Books, 2009, p 28.
6 GNU is a ‘recursive acronym’ for ‘GNU’s not Unix’. Unix, although a proprietary product, was also largely the work of another lone programmer, Ken Thompson, who wrote it in his own time, against the wishes of management, in 1969.
7 Moody, op cit.
8 W Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, Free Press, 2009.
9 J Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, HarperCollins Publishers, 2011.
10 Arthur, op cit., p 25.
11 Richard Rudgley, Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, Century, London, 1998.
12 Martin Jones, Feast: Why Humans Share Food, Oxford University Press, 2007.
13 Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden, Faber, London, 2001.
14 George Dyson, BaidarkaAlaska Northwest Pub Co, 1986.
15 Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: the evolution of egalitarian behavior, Harvard University Press, 2001.
16 M Sidanius & F Pratto, Social Dominance: an intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
17 George Packer, ‘Change the World’, The New Yorker, 27 May 2013, nin.tl/packerNY.
18 Heidi M Ravven, The Self Beyond Itself, New Press, 2013, p 299.
19 David Berreby ‘The Hunter-Gatherers of the Knowledge Economy,’ Strategy and Business 16 July 1999.
20 Steven A Epstein, Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe, University of North Carolina Press, 1991, p 245.
21 Lynn Townsend White, Medieval religion and technology: collected essays, Publications of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of California Press, 1978, pp x-xi.
22 Nigel Harris, ‘Globalisation Is Good for You’, Red Pepper, 3 Dec 2007, nin.tl/HarrisRP
23 David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, Profile, London, 2010, p 46.
24 Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, 5 Dec 2007, nin.tl/Freedland07
25 Mark Neocleous, ‘The Political Economy of the Dead: Marx’s Vampires’, History of Political Thought, Vol 24, No 4, 2003, pp 668-84.
26 Economic Concentration, ‘Hearings before the subcommittee on antitrust and monopoly of the committee of the judiciary’, US Senate, 89th Congress, First Session, 18, 24, 25 and 27 May and 17 June 1965.
27 John Jewkes, The Sources of Invention. Macmillan, London/St Martin’s Press, NY, 1958.
28 Economic Concentration, op cit, p 1075.
29 Ibid, p 1217.
30 ‘Silicon Valley’s culture of failure … and ‘the walking dead’ it leaves behind’, Rory Carroll, The Guardian, 28 June 2014, nin.tl/Siliconfailure
31 N Rosenberg, Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p 229.
32 Daniel Cohen, P Garibaldi and S Scarpetta. The ICT Revolution: Productivity Differences and the Digital Divide, Oxford University Press US, 2004.
33 Ibid, p 85.
34 William Morris, How we live and how we might live, 1884, 1887.
35 Creativity. Selected readings, ed Philip E Vernon, Penguin, 1970.
36 Guy Claxton, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, Fourth Estate, London, 1998.
37 Ibid, pp 77-78.
38 James D Moran, ‘The detrimental effects of reward on performance’, in Mark R Lepper and David Greene, The Hidden Costs of Reward, Erlbaum 1978; James D Moran and Ellen YY Liou, ‘Effects of reward on creativity in college students of two levels of ability’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 54, no 1, 1982, 43–48.
39 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
40 Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, Yale University Press, 2009, p 55.
41 Ibid, pp 40-41.
42 Ibid, p 429.
43 Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths, 2014. Mazzucato published an earlier, shorter version for Demos in 2011, which may be downloaded free from their website: nin.tl/Mazzucato
44 J Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory,