Genesis - a Parable

In the beginning, Mr. Morse created the telegraph.  Crude, costly, and rare.  And Mr. Morse looked upon his creation, and saw that it was good.

And Mr. Bell said, “Let there be voice, that travels across the wires.”  Mr. Bell called it the telephone.  Then Mr. Bell said, “Watson, come here, I need you.”  And there was voice, and it was good.

And Mr. Cooper held a brick into the air and said, “Begone the wires.”  And he called his brick the cell phone.  And there was voice, and there were no wires.  And it was good.

And Mr. Gore said, “let the wires and the bricks, and the larger bricks called computers, come together in cyberspace.  And the thing shall be called the internet.  And it shall be everywhere."  And Mr. Gore looked upon his creation, and saw that it was good.

And Mr. Ayyadurai said, let the postal mail travel across cyberspace so that all mankind may be instantly contacted, even he who has no voice and no brick. And thus the internet begat e-mail, and it was very good.

And the corporations said, “let us replace our postal mail with e-mail, reducing costs while increasing throughput and efficiency and morale.”  And so it was. And it was pretty good.

But the young, those not yet shackled to the corporations, said “send and receive not from the tree of e-mail, for it is evil, and ye shall be uncool.”  And the young instead communicated in an obscure language of tongues known as texting.  And it was fast, and it was kewl, and it was blasphemy unto all spelling and syntax.

The corporations beheld the young texting, and asked, “who told you that you were illiterate?”  And there was silence, for they did not understand the question.

Lo, in the early days before cyberspace, graduate students in the distant and foreign land known as MIT had said “let our messages traverse the wires of yon mainframe instantly, to inform and enlighten each other without delay.”  And this later became known as Instant Messaging, or AIM, or the Serpent in the Garden. 

And the young looked upon the Serpent, and called it cool.  And AIM begat Skype; and texting begat sexting; and Skype begat Webcam Girls, and it was all very, very bad.

Then the corporations, seeking to harness the superior technical knowledge of the young so as to maximize profits, purchased licenses from the Serpent, thence known as Microsoft Lync.  And they looked upon Skype, and repurposed it as Web Conferencing.  And the corporations saw all that they had co-opted, and saw that it had saved money. And they called it good.

Then all the workers in the land became users of Instant Messages and Web Conferencing.

And lo, there were no more face-to-face meetings, except online.  And it came to pass that they could no longer focus on their work, for e-mail, which had replaced the telephone, had itself been replaced by the IM.  And the tyranny of the Serpent known as IM demanded instant and constant attention.  Productivity was lost.  Money was lost.  And the Consultants looked upon this, and declared that it Was Not Good.

And the Consultants, Pharisees of the corporate world, said “I give you every tool of empowerment on the face of the whole Earth, the fruit of every keyboard and the wisdom of every gigabyte; go forth and heal thyself.”

And the workers said, “Watson, come here. I need you.”

And it was good.