Some more thoughts about tech bashing

Indiscriminate and non-factual condemnation of new technologies is something that has consistently been, through the years, one of the most irritating attitudes I have been confronted to. Now, my recent participation to a training session about NLP is making me even more sensitive to generalisations although I think I do need them to a certain extent to be able to learn and "navigate" the world.

I recently came across a sentence written by Alvin Toffler and I would like to quote him because I strongly back his view:

"To think that the new economy is over is like
somebody in London in 1830 saying the entire industrial revolution is
over because some textile manufacturers in Manchester went broke" - Alvin Toffler

Yes there have been failures. I choose to call them experience. I choose to view them as opportunities to learn. I choose to congratulate and honor and thank all those young and not so young, experienced or "green", rigorous and not so rigorous, who took part in the EXCITING, SUPERB, UNIQUE endeavours that characterized the Valley in the late nineties. Failures were most of the time superb because they were original and thought provoking. Successes were brilliant and inspiring. R&D happened on the grandest scale in human history. The cost was high. I don't think there are shortcuts to any place worth going. Each success clarified and confirmed the benefits of good infotech (good infotech is a subjective concept I will not explore here). Each failure brought us closer to using infotech much better. Why should we focus on failures only to argue that infotech is useless or that "the Internet makes no difference to distribution of music" (sic!)? How much value did successes AND failures actually generate? How do we measure the learning process? What is the value of the direct and indirect experience that was acquired during the past 35 years of actual use of infotech?

Yes infotech is alive and kicking!