<nettime> Imagine

[David Garcia via Nettime-tmp <nettime-tmp@mail.ljudmila.org>]

Science fiction is by no means always about the future it can also start 
by imagining an alternative past or present but with a single key 
counterfactual that changes everything. So taking this as a starting 
point let's suppose the internet had never been invented (or otherwise 
come into being). In this scenario the computer is still there, mobile 
telephony is still there, just not the internet. There are those who 
might argue that such a proposition is itself technologically illiterate 
as the internet follows as inevitably as night follows day from the 
existence and proximity of telephony and computers. So the marriage is 
inevitable as is the progeny. To which I reply; of course but that is 
the author’s challenge, to imagine a plausible set of circumstantial 
obstacles, social, political, technical or military. How might it have 
happened and how would the world look? what would have changed? The 
exercise is in some sense a war against amnesia as even those of us born 
before the age of mass computing would struggle to remember what life 
was like before the internet.
David Garcia
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