[O]ne anecdote [in Jill Lepore’s If Then] that has really stuck with me is the following: Right at the moment when Simulmatics made its big entry into politics, the 1960 election season, Harpers ran a very critical, where-will-this-all-end piece about the company. Unbeknownst to readers, and perhaps to Harpers, the whole thing was written by a guy who was part-timing for Simulmatics. I’d always thought of “Gee Whiz, This Tech Sure Is Neat” stories as the result of PR flacks doing their best, but—naive fellow that I sometimes am—it had not really occurred to me that PR could also speak in the voice of the forelock-tugging cultural pessimist, the person who wonders whether a particular technology will permanently diminish the meaning of being human. But “This widget I made is so powerful *that it threatens the Platonic Forms*” is actually a great message if you want to make everybody adopt your technology. People will use something they regard as inevitable even if they don’t like it. I do it every time I drive a car or take a plane. Best to be loved and feared, but better to be feared than loved, as Machiavelli argued. So all those news stories about children zombifying themselves: they’re not necessarily fake, the anecdotes might all be real, the journalist’s motivation may even be sincere alarm, but the work such stories do in the aggregate is very much in line with Claude’s PR strategy.
inevitable, even if they don't like it
Sara Hendren
@ablerism