to: ellipsis
from: jcj
8 July 1996
subject: letter eight G
attachments: softecnica one - book
: softecnica three - the phone
: softecnica ten - spaceflight
dear Tom and Jonathan
Now for the last of these three letters devoted to
antecedents of the internet and of this text.
For the softecnica piece on the 'book' I am asking
you, Jonathan, to include a facsimile of the title
page from my eighteenth-century copy of the book
in which John Dryden looks back on his life as one
of the first people to make a living as a literary
poet. And for ' the phone' I hope you will make a
hypertext link to your piece on the ellipsis
homepage, where I hope it can remain as a record
of your by-now quite famous experiment in electric
typography, or typogramming as you may call it.
I believe that these two texts, seen together, are
a nice conclusion to this trio of letters re the
recent and distant past of what we are doing. And
I am hoping that when we can view them in the
context of all the others that they will really
seem at home and completely relevant. For the
internet has been in people's minds for a long
time now.
I remember something like it in Project Mac at mit
in 1965.* But I don't think anyone foresaw the
enormous public interest that it could provoke,
any more than they foresaw the earlier booms in
pocket calculators and in home computing. It's the
'everyone' part that was difficult to foresee, I
suppose because we were all so strongly
conditioned to think only of the narrow jobs on
which we depend for security as fixtures in the
economic landscape ...
Not so any longer. The present generation of young
adults is the first for a century or two to face
this instability, and with it the probability of
earning less than their parents and going down the
social scale instead of up. No wonder there came
yuppies and a fashion for being tough and
streetwise and self-reliant and conformist. Those
who dismiss these fashions do not know the world
as it's become. In the past I've dismissed them
myself.
In a way this book-cum-electronic-text is the real
outcome of the softecnica articles though there
was no internet when I wrote them. It was
originally proposed by Daniel Weil and Franco
Raggi for translation into Italian for the design
journal Modo. Hence the Italianate word softecnica
which I thought up for the occasion but which has
since crept into English. Had there been an
internet then I'd surely have found a place for it
among the ten softecnica pieces (only a few of
which were published as Modo changed its editor
soon after they began to appear there in 1983).
And then, when Paul Verhaert asked me to write
something to celebrate the twenty-fifth birthday
of his aerospace design company, he accepted some
of the softopias, plus one I wrote specially about
spaceflight. And then I happened to send a copy of
the resulting book, From the imposed to the
adaptive, to you and it arrived in time to give
you a subject to experiment with on the
website-design-website world3 of Nick Routledge in
California ...
I always like tracing the antecedents and
consequences of unexpected events like these that
can lead us in new directions. And for this
particular one I'm extra glad.
So now back to the future, as we've learnt to call
it, but actually to the present. Which, as Edwin
Schlossberg said to me once, is a lonely place.
jcj