The techno-thrill is gone

After Sept. 11, we know digital wizardry can't save the world -- or even distract us from horror. But don't trash those gadgets yet.

By Andrew Leonard

Dec. 21, 2001 | It was a dragon punch, I think, or maybe a fireball move, executed with flashing thumbs by a man playing what looked to be Super StreetFighter 2X Revival on his new Gameboy Advance, that made me realize I hadn't been paying attention.

Exiting a subway train, I glanced down and was transfixed. The graphics, color and resolution of the Gameboy were riveting; the two kung fu masters pirouetting in air leaped off the three-inch screen. Caught in a spasm of techno-envy, I savored, for a split second, a familiar moment of awareness: Technology was leapfrogging itself, again.

Such moments always inspire equal parts irritation and delight: irritation at the inexorable planned obsolescence of high-tech gadgetry; delight at the fact that some new models really are cooler than last year's. And it's an awareness that I used to breathe on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis; a part of the roaring '90s indistinguishable from the surge of the Internet, the mainstream advent of e-mail and the Web, the debuts of Amazon, Yahoo and eBay, multigigabyte hard drives and weekly updates of Netscape Navigator. There was a time, somewhere around 1996 or 1997, when the gadgets and the software and the Net really did seem to be getting better all the time.

There was a deeper structure, too, that was even more exciting, tied to the communities and collaboration made possible by the Net. The sheer amount of information available to the world in the new online library could only be a good thing. The free software movement suggested that computer technology could usher in a kind of democratic egalitarianism that would be truly liberating. The astoundingly burgeoning powers of networked computers would unleash all kinds of individual creativity. I never subscribed to the out-of-control techno-libertarian thesis that the digital world would wipe out governments and international borders, but I did believe something empowering was going on. Sure, the necessity to purchase a new high-powered computer every six months to run ever-more-bloated software could be annoying, but that was OK. DSL really was better than dial-up, computers always got cheaper and you simply couldn't live without the Net.

The dot-com boom, initially, was rooted in that self-evident sense of being on an endless escalator of betterment. But the dementia of the stock market bubble of 1999 and early 2000, substituting greed for glee, began to overwhelm the positive excitement. And the bust ended up making it all seem like a dream. After the election madness of late 2000, the collapse of the economy into the recession of 2001 and, of course, Sept. 11, the attention of those of us who had made an infatuation with technology into a career understandably wandered. As companies went bankrupt and layoffs mounted and bombs began to fall, once-pressing questions -- like whether Linux-based operating systems would ever become truly user-friendly -- lost their urgency.

But seeing that Gameboy made me want to stop and smell the semiconductors. Wasn't I missing out?

There was my friend who had given me a CD he had burned himself with MP3s downloaded via Napster. And there was my neighbor who enjoyed rewinding live television via his Replay TV set, even as he downloaded multimegabyte Photoshop files into his laptop via his wireless broadband home network. And what about that moment just two weeks ago when I unpacked the Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention System 2.0 that I had bought for my son's birthday, and realized that the infrared tower would only plug into a USB port, which my aging desktop lacked?

And yet, though my Gameboy sighting made me wonder how I could ever have become deaf to the siren-song beep of technology's inexorable march forward, it only reminded me of my fondness for following the upgrade path -- it didn't rekindle it. I was remembering what it had been like to be exhilarated by constant change, but I wasn't actually excited again.

It's easy enough to guess why. Since Sept. 11, priorities have changed. For months, I've been more fascinated with Islamic fundamentalism than free software, with the geopolitics of oil rather than the laws laid down by code -- and I'm sure I'm not alone. Techno-driven exuberance begins to fade when you notice that history, culture and religion don't follow the same rules as personal data assistants and game consoles. Next year's model isn't automatically better. Our bombs may have been smarter in Afghanistan than ever before, and it's nice, right now, to revel in the euphoria of knocking the Taliban off their repressive perch, but is the world really a better place? What other horror is being birthed elsewhere, while our attention is focused on Tora Bora? Poverty, war, hatred, death -- Sept. 11 was just another punctuation mark of horror delimiting the end of a century replete with them.

After the dot-com bust, I could say, well, those venture capitalists and investment bankers never really understood what the Net was really about -- they didn't really "get it." But after Sept. 11, I began wondering whether I too had been blithely ignorant. The Internet was no longer the story, it was a sideshow. And in such a context, what do good Gameboy graphics really mean? Why should I care about wireless connectivity and flat-screen monitors? Next war, I'll probably be able to use my PDA to view real-time satellite broadcast video of helicopter gunships blasting villages into rubble -- but I won't be a better person for it. The potential of the Internet to change society or empower individual creativity pales against the threats of bioterror, nuclear weapons proliferation, secret military tribunals and the spread of radical fundamentalisms of all kinds. If Silicon Valley wasn't convinced that it was no longer the center of the universe after the dot-com bust, then Sept. 11 brought the news home with a sledgehammer.

Sept. 11 refocused American attention on the real world, and for that, maybe, we should be grateful. But I'm finding, as a longtime technophile, that the events of this fall have had a chillingly unexpected aftershock. Even as the gadgets march on, and the resolutions get crisper, and the bandwidth pipes get fatter, I'm wondering, do I even believe, anymore, in progress?

Next page: When the spell of the hottest games breaks, what's left?