The Digital Writer  

 

The readers of Sunoasis 1997-2002 know that I have advocated for writers to get up on the wild beast and ride it for awhile. I still believe that is sound advice. Over the years I've given my interpretation of what I think is going on. I think the publishing world is in the jaws of massive change with the digital world being the great catalyst. It's been going along for some time.

In fact, the first time I caught wind of these things was in the early 70's while a student in Sacramento, CA. At that time I was reading in a class on the "study of the Future," and came across futurist writing like the Toffler's and Seibold. They predicted desk-top computers and networked computers and I was so taken with the idea I wrote a story for a short story class that was taught by the novelist Richard Bankowski. In an assignment to write a science fiction story I wrote about a world in which everyone would have a computer on their desk and shop, vote, work, pay taxes, fornicate, break the law, etc from the pushing of buttons. That was one premise. The other premise was that the government had swept through the nation and collected all the outsiders, all the discontented minds like poets, thinkers, inventors, who might throw a monkey wrench into the seamless web they were creating.

The malcontents were flown up to asteroids where they enjoyed safe, albeit, Spartan conditions and were free to pursue whatever avenue to thought or imagination they wished, without disturbance.

That was the premise of the story. The story followed three technicians who are called upon to fly to one of the asteroids and find out why there is no more communications from it. To make a long story short, one of the engineers begins to investigate his true feelings about what sort of world is really superior and decides that even an asteroid world dominated by thinking and imagining is superior to the arid push button world of the Earth below.

Professor Bankowski liked the story and wanted to steal the idea but criticized the way the characters had been presented. At any rate, the point is that the present world was in the minds of people before it was actually built.

I went to live in Berkeley, CA in 1975. Lo and behold, it was the moment the personal computer revolution was starting to take off among the nerds and hobbyists who would come to Berkeley and share their programs and machines with each other. I used to read the throw away publications on this new phenomena and came across many references to the Internet and the possibilities it held out for the future.

By that time I had become cynical enough to dismiss it all as adolescent fantasy spurred on by the Tom Swift novels I had read in my teen years. But then, the thing took off. In 1978 I was working at a place called Computer Component Corporation and a few blinks later there was Silicon Valley, a 40 minute drive away, mushrooming up with more vitality than anything I've experienced before or since.

It's real! I thought to myself.

David


Back to The Digital Writer