This morning I happened upon an interesting article in the Chronicle Review about computer scientist (and much more besides) David Gelernter. The article is about his new book, Judaism: A Way of Being, but mainly about the impact his serious injuries at the hands of a parcel bomb from the Unabomber transformed his way of thinking and being.

It reminded me that Gelernter's 1998 book, Machine Beauty, is one of my all-time favourites about the culture of computing. Thinking about this book from the perspective of a world transformed by Apple's design aesthetic and capability, it looks rather far-sighted (although actually the book is somewhat critical of Apple). His formula for beauty is power+simplicity, so there's more than a whiff of high modernism in his personal machine aesthetic. Gelernter has his passions about different bits of technology and they differ from mine. But what I really like about Machine Beauty is that it gets away from the tech-mania of many geeks, and places the machines in the realm of the human.

This theme emerges in the Chronicle Review article as well. Author Evan Goldstein writes:

Two years after the bombing, Theodore J. Kaczynski, who would shortly
be identified as the Unabomber, sent Gelernter a letter: “People with
advanced degrees aren't as smart as they think they are,” he wrote. “If
you'd had any brains you would have realized that there are a lot of
people out there who resent bitterly the way techno-nerds like you are
changing the world.” Gelernter himself, in fact, has always been
profoundly ambivalent about technology. “Because David has a concern
for the whole of human life, he doesn't fall for the view that
technology can provide answers to our deepest needs and aspirations,”
says Kass. Gelernter's byline routinely appears over articles that
include statements like: “American schools would do better if they
junked their Macs and PC's and let students fool around somewhere else.
Schools should be telling students to reads books, not play with
computers.”