LONCAN Emilie
Technology – people never had it so good In the 1964 election campaign, Harold Wilson, as leader of the Labour Party, put the stress on ‘the white heat of technological revolution’. White heat was not the most representative image at the moment. Much of the new technology dealt more with suds, shine and phoney flavours. Wilson’s government even established a Ministry of Technology with, at its head, Frank Cousins, a trade-union leader, which did not make sense at all. No one could doubt about the benefits and comfort brought by technology. In other words, as the Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan actually said ‘Most of our people have never had it so good’. This quote became a popular and vulgar joke which tore round Great Britain during the 1959 election campaign. ‘A woman complains to the police that she has been raped by one of the candidates, who, she insists, was the Conservative; she knows this, ‘because she’s never had it so good’ (1). For sure, technology affects your daily life and you don’t even notice any change and comfort it has brought to you anymore – except when it deals with the new I-phone you have just bought. You don’t believe me? So can you imagine yourself just for a second without your mobile phone, your laptop computer, television and above all your pocket calculator? Computer engineers must have been considered as real busy bees shaping their own virtual hives. That was the time when the growing breed of the ‘white-coated workers’ and technocrats assumed power. Federico Faggin and Marcian Hoff launched the microprocessor revolution in 1971, then two years later, Xerox PARC, a Californian research and development company, designed the first PC (Personal Computer). But such technological progress did not remain any kind of dehumanized and robotic work. Indeed, it has completely disrupted the way human beings see themselves. Making use of such computers and advanced research laboratories, Frederick Sanger, an English biochemist, succeeded in sequencing DNA in 1975. That’s why he had received two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry. As a result, human beings became unique individuals made of DNA molecules they pass on to their offspring – included faults and vices, unfortunately. Hence the proverb: ‘like father like son’. In the seventies, children also ‘never had it so good’: in 1968, the Brown Box, the first home video game console, was invented by Ralph H. Baer, a German-born American engineer. No doubt that their parents would have preferred a simple and less addictive hobby such as the colourful and headache Rubik’s Cube, created in 1974 by Ernö Rubik, a Hungarian professor of architecture. As for teenagers, the awkward age
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