nothing but hammers

A nice take on technology and the narrative of decline:

We must, at some level, need this to be true, since we think it’s true about so many different kinds of things. We experience this sense of fracture so deeply that we ascribe it to machines that, viewed with retrospective detachment, don’t seem remotely capable of producing it. If all you have is a hammer, the saying goes, everything looks like a nail; and, if you think the world is broken, every machine looks like the hammer that broke it.

He sides with the folks saying "this ain't new" for the most part but still acknowledges that history is no guarantor of continuity. Quite the opposite. And new technologies do bring about changes. He argues that the interwebs have inverted the internal and the external. Absent actual physical interaction communication online can seem internalized:

Thus the limitless malice of Internet commenting: it’s not newly unleashed anger but what we all think in the first order, and have always in the past socially restrained if only thanks to the look on the listener’s face—the monstrous music that runs through our minds is now played out loud. 

Perhaps that will change with time and our online interactions will become more civil. Or maybe we'll all just go to hell in a handbasket. If nothing else, the future is much more interesting than it was.