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theory on demand
make him obsolete. And when the dream comes true he’ll be dead wood. One of those people who need to be told to get out of the way. Part of the process.”44 But power doesn’t exactly follow the logic of knowledge production as Lewis describes it. Those in power worldwide perhaps do not produce “change.” But they are perfectly aware of how to own “change” once it has reached the point of profitability. Giving up power is not “part of the process.” Change is a disruptive affair, often caused by revolutions (some cultural), wars (civil and otherwise) and recessions. It is a violent act. The baby-boom elites are in no danger of being overruled because the young lack a basic understanding of how power operates (and Lewis would be the last one to tell them). It’s pathetic to suggest the elderly will voluntarily make way for the next generations just because they know more about how technology works. In his review of The Future Just Happened, Steve Poole writes: “By the end of his series of meetings with horribly focused children, there is a whiff in Lewis’s prose of real, old-fashioned nostalgia – nostalgia for the past, when kids were just kids, and authors could more easily get a handle on the changing world around them.”45 Lewis is not ready for the looming conflicts over intellectual property rights, censorship and ownership of the means of distribution. The possibility of an enemy from outside the technological realm – for instance, Islamic extremists or other fundamentalists – doesn’t cross his mind. The a priori here is technocratic hegemony, determining all other aspects of life. This is perhaps the most outdated idea in Lewis’ work: that technologists are the only ones who shape the future.
Brenda Laurel’s Purple Moon The last dotcom testimony I will analyze here has firm roots in cultural IT research. Utopian Entrepreneur is a long essay by Brenda Laurel, author of Computer as Theatre and female computer games pioneer. It is an honest and accessible account of what went wrong with her Purple Moon startup, a website and CD-ROM games company targeted at teenage girls.46 Sadly, Laurel’s economic analysis does not cut very deep. After having gone through the collapses of computer and games company Atari, the prestigious Silicon Valley Interval research lab, and most recently Purple Moon, Brenda Laurel, along with many similar good hearted “cultural workers” seems to be gearing up again for the next round of faulty business. Nervous how-to PowerPoint-ism prevails over firm analysis. As long as there is the promise of politically correct (“humanist”) popular computer culture, for Laurel any business practice, it seems, is allowable. Laurel is an expert in human computer interface design, usability and gender issues around computer games. She is a great advocate of research; Utopian Researcher could perhaps have been a more accurate title for the book. Laurel is insightful on the decline of corporate IT research, on how the religion of speed, pushed by venture capitalists and IPO-obsessed CEOs, all but destroyed long-term fundamental research: “Market research, as it is usually practiced, is problematic for a couple of reasons. Asking people to choose their favorites among all the things that already exist doesn’t necessarily support innovation; it maps the territory but may not help you plot a new trajectory.”47 Laurel’s method, like that of many of her colleagues interested in computer usability, is to sit down and talk to users: “learning about people with your eyes and mind and heart wide open. Such