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Silence Is a Commons by Ivan Illich (1983)

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168 points entaloneralie | 5 comments | 18 Jul 25 21:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.416s | source
1. profsummergig ◴[18 Jul 25 22:35 UTC] No.44610527[source]▶
Computers could hardly do anything back then. Mostly backend data processing.

Yet this speech could have been written today.

Intriguing.

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2. ttoinou ◴[18 Jul 25 22:40 UTC] No.44610584[source]▶
Similar to Guy Debord in The Society of Spectacle, what he wrote witnessing the beginning of TV and mass cinema applies for us in 2025, 100 fold
3. layer8 ◴[18 Jul 25 23:10 UTC] No.44610814[source]▶
Neuromancer was published only half a year later.

Or take The Machine Stops from 1909.

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4. noosphr ◴[19 Jul 25 10:00 UTC] No.44614086[source]▶
People act like you need a petaflop for something to be useful. The US census of 1890 would have been impossible to complete before the next one started without puchcard machines. One may as well say the information age arrived then. Anyone with basic numeracy and imagination could imagine what the future held at that point.
5. forinti ◴[19 Jul 25 14:22 UTC] No.44615687[source]▶
Data processing by itself was a major leap in productivity.

My city ran its payroll on a single computer with 64KB of RAM. This would have required weeks of work from a whole team of bureaucrats.