Review: “In the Beginning… Was the Command Line”
Partly due to a comment I left on Amelia Torode’s blog, I’m re-reading Neal Stephenson’s 1999 monograph In the Beginning…Was the Command Line
This particular book concerns itself with the history and nature of operating systems, how they are shaped by and reflect our wider culture, and how (in turn) they shape our society. It makes fascinating reading, but it’s been almost ten years since I last read it and much has changed.
For one thing, the future didn’t work out the way Stephenson (or anyone at the time) expected. Stephenson forecast doom for Apple, for example:
They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly.
But in 1999 when he wrote this, Apple stock was in fact just beginning to recover from its disastrous performance in the mid nineties.
The reason for this recovery? Steve Jobs had recently rejoined Apple as CEO following his years in exile. (It’s particularly poignant to recall this in a month where Jobs has been forced to take taken 6 months medical leave from Apple.)
Stephenson noted:
Only last week… the technology sections of all the newspapers were filed with adulatory press coverage of how Apple released the iMac in several happenin’ new colors like Blueberry and Tangerine
At the time, Stephenson ridiculed this as another example of Apple’s close-minded reliance on pretty-but-closed hardware. Now Apple watchers know now that the underpowered, floppy-driveless iMac helped lift Apple out of a world of beige computers and into the market-making consumer electronics company it has become today. And no-one seems to care that you can’t change the battery on an iPod, iPhone, or even the new MacBookPro.
So some things haven’t worked out as one would have expected. Indeed Stephenson himself is back in the Mac fold (I too deserted Apple in the mid-to-late nineties. It wasn’t a hard decision.)
But despite history proving Stephenson a little premature in his announcement of Apple’s demise there is much that is good in this book. Stephenson fans will know that his writing is both erudite and accessible; discussing operating systems he ranges over a wide territory that includes:
- The origins of anti-intellectualism in Europe
- The need for and application of metaphor in popular cultural life
- The “two cultures” split in modern society
But this is the passage that caught my eye and made me want to write this post:
It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords — multiculturalism and diversity — are false fronts that are being used … to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or “honoring diversity” or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other — to stop asserting (and eventually to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false…
The lesson most people are taking home from the twentieth century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe … it is necessary for people to suspend judgement in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility toward, all authority figures …
The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgements as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there’s no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgements, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor and begin pumping bullets into Westerners… When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds.
Agree or disagree, this is exactly why people read Stephenson. If you’re the type of person who treads the line between social-observer and tech-fan, you’ll love In the Beginning…Was the Command Line
