How to Understand How Things Ever Got This Bad

I believe I’ve mentioned them before, but back in the ‘90s, AT&T had a series of ads promising incredible things technology would allow us to do in the future. In almost every case they were right about the final function of the device but wrong in some way about the mechanism. They had video phones with big CRT displays, GPS systems where all of the data was stored on a series of CDs, that sort of thing.

One of their predictions was a tablet computer that would allow you to “send a fax, from the beach.” Some people laugh at that because who sends faxes anymore, then they send an email with a pdf attached, which serves the exact same function. I look at that ad and what jumps out at me is that they predicted a world in which you are never out of touch, and as such your employer expects you to be on call to perform work tasks no matter when it’s needed or where you are. I know more than one person for whom that prediction came true.

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