Kevin Kelly is one of those old-school techno-optimists I greatly admire. He was a champion of the internet from the earliest days, without succumbing to the kind of blind boosterism and willfully ignorant naïveté of contemporary tech culture.

So I’m glad he won his bet¹, and am decidedly in his camp opposing Kirkpatrick Sale’s brand of neo-luddism, not to mention Sale’s disgraceful soreloserdom. Still, this line from the musical Sale wrote with Thomas Pynchon (in 1958!) resonates:

All we want is someplace where every time we turn around we don’t see that idiot damn machine staring at us.