It’s Time for a New Compact for Connectivity

In the Beckett play Happy Days, the main character, Winnie, begins the play buried to her waist in a mound of dirt. A bell rings. She wakes up. And she announces: “Another heavenly day.” She carries on. She goes through her routines. She talks incessantly. She is adapting to her circumstances. When the second act begins, the mound has risen to her neck. And Winnie keeps adapting, absurdly chirpy as her situation becomes more dire. Supposedly, the play is about mortality and decay, about the human condition, but for me the play's absurd horror is the progressive foreclosure of Winnie's possibilities for action. Her world changes around her. Her freedom to act shrinks and shrinks. And she responds by adapting to each new reality. Sometimes I worry that this is how we are beginning to talk about technology. Another heavenly day. The mound rises. Our imagined possibilities for action get smaller. And we adapt. That is the horror scenario. Not simply that technology changes quickly. It's that we begin to believe we have no role in determining the terms of that change. Nothing I heard here makes me think we need to accept that. In fact, I heard people reopening questions that had supposedly been settled. I heard people proposing institutions that don't exist yet. I heard people asking what existing authorities haven't been used to their full potential. I heard people thinking about what we can build, not merely what we need to defend. So here’s my exhortation to not be Winnie: We are not buried up to our necks; our possibilities of action are not foreclosed. So let’s act accordingly.