
The Thing that Gets You to the Thing
Andrea and I binged watched1 “Halt and Catch Fire” recently. The show is great2, and if you haven’t seen it but like computers, you should go watch it. The story is about the lives of a group of people tangled up together in the early days of computing and the Internet. It covers a little over 10 years, from about the release of the first Macintosh to around Eternal September.
There’s a line in it that comes up a few times in different contexts: “Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing”. When it is first said by the wonderfully flawed salesman Joe MacMillan it can be read two ways:
- Computers are a product that can be sold to make money (money is the thing).
- Computers are a tool, and the features of a computer mean nothing unless it can do what you need it to do (whatever you’re trying to get done in your life is the thing).
I won’t spoil anything but the meaning of that specific phrase shifts quite a bit throughout the story, especially in relation to Joe’s life. But as the series’ timeline makes it to the Internet, you get the third meaning, a computer is a tool, but the “thing” is not a business problem, it’s connecting with other people. The idea of a computer, or the Internet by way of a computer, being a tool that connects you with other people resonates with me, it’s kind of how I’ve always viewed the purpose of the Internet. Email replaced letters, forums and message boards made social communities that transcended geographic location. The Internet could be an amazing way to communicate with so many people, at such incredible speed.
But I wonder these days if we’re past the Internet being the thing that gets us to the thing and we’ve moved, perhaps catastrophically, to the Internet being the thing. In the past week half the news I’ve seen online has been either geopolitical drama around TikTok or Meta giving up on its fact checking programs. Realistically, and I don’t think I’m just being a cranky elder-Millennial here, neither of these things should matter at fucking all. It’s not like the people on TikTok cease to exist when TikTok can’t be downloaded3. It’s not like facts stop existing because Meta stops verifying them one way or the other.
Anyway. Maybe I’m just a little vexed because recently all of the people who would love for their slices of the Internet to be the thing, who have done so much work to subsume many of the parts of the Internet that I loved, have found the courage to loudly proclaim all of their terrible ideas and reinforce their general shit-bagginess. Maybe it’s because I started reading The Anxious Generation. Maybe it’s time to become a humanities teacher at a private school.
If nothing else, let me help you get to this thing, which is a great little tune to listen to while you think about what the Internet has become.
Footnotes
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As much as those orbiting 40 binge watch things, two episodes a night, almost every night, until we saw the whole thing. ↩
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Thanks to Jeff for the recommendation, it’s a great series. You didn’t Jeff this one up. ↩
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Ok maybe some of them do because they’re fucking AI but that’s too much for me right now. ↩