The Wiki Man | 13 December 2008

It’s not always a good idea to read certain books when you’re too young. At school it didn’t occur to any of us that Brave New World was meant to be a bad place — it seemed like a utopian fantasy world to me. Advice to writers: if you want to alarm teenagers with the nightmarish prospect of a dystopian future, it’s a good idea not to fill it with really cool drugs and high-tech pornography.

More mature people, however, do worry about new technology, especially its effects on sex and morality. A tabloid scare a few years ago caused much hand-wringing about ‘Internet Child Adoption’; all that had happened was that a childless couple had used the internet to find the telephone number of an adoption agency overseas, but the addition of the word ‘Internet’ made the event instantly more shocking, as though someone had started a kind of eBay for orphans. Every invention brings a backlash of warnings that it will erode the social restraints and inhibitions vital to civilised society. There is a Jacobean tract in which the writer preaches against the prospect of human flight for fear that, once men and women could move freely through the air, the roofs of churches would be covered with amorous couples. In 1897 a crowd of Cambridge undergraduates hanged an effigy of a woman opposite the Senate House to protest against the admission of women — and expressed their horror of liberated women by sitting the effigy on a bicycle (http://snipurl.com/newnham).

But are we worrying about the wrong things here? While we all agonise about moral issues, the most dangerous technology of recent years has spread without a voice raised against it. I am talking about the spreadsheet.