Any Sane Person in Computers Right Now: “Are We the Baddies?”

Sold a Bill of Goods on February 17, 2026 It’s hard not to wonder, in a type of technological midlife crisis, if the cultural phenomenon called Computers isn’t well past its sell-by date by now. In the 1980s, personal computers represented a path out of the angst and malaise of the 1970s. It was the shiny new thing, and oddly it proved very attractive to many former hippies looking for a way to achieve commercial success in an emerging field of creative endeavor. In the 1990s, the computer industry was all about the transition from isolated PCs to a global network called “Cyberspace” or “The Information Superhighway” or whatever silly nicknames people came up with (a series of tubes?). In other words, The Internet. In the 2000s, it was all about going from network-as-commerce to network-as-self-expression. So-called “Web 2.0” allowed anyone to express themselves in a myriad of ways, although the sad truth is the end result of Web 2.0 represented a mass shift away from individual…