Machines for these purposes are now o ftwo types: keyboard machines for accounting and th elike, manually controlled for the insertion of data, a n dusually automatically controlled as far as the sequenceof operations is concerned; and punched-card machinesin which separate operations are usually delegated toa series of machines, and the cards then transferredbodily from one to another. B oth forms are very useful; bu t as far as complex computations are concerned,both are still in embryo.

I t is strange thatthe inventors of universal languages have not seizedupon the idea of producing one which better fittedthe technique for transmitting and recording speech

Assume a linear ratio of 100 for future use. Considerfilm of the same thickness as paper, although thinnerfilm will certainly be usable. Even under these conditions there would be a total factor of 10,000 betweenthe bulk of the ordinary record on books, and itsmicrofilm replica. The Encyclopaedia Britannica couldbe reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library ofa million volumes could be compressed into one endof a desk. I f the human race has produced since theinvention of movable type a total record, in the formof magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertisingblurbs, correspondence, having a volume correspondingto a billion books, the whole affair, assembled andcompressed, could be lugged off in a moving van.Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needsnot only to make and store a record but also be able toconsult it, and this aspect of the m atter comes later.Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few.

A scene itself can be just as well looked over linebyline by the photocell in this way as can a photographof the scene. This whole apparatus constitutes a camera, with the added feature, which can be dispensedwith if desired, of making its picture at a distance. Itis slow, and the picture is poor in detail. Still, it doesgive another process of dry photography, in which thepicture is finished as soon as it is taken.

The camera hound of the futurewears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. I t takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to beprojected or enlarged, which after all involves only afactor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is ofuniversal focus, down to any distance accommodatedby the unaided eye, simply because it is of short focallength. There is a built-in photocell on the walnutsuch as we now have on at least one camera, whichautomatically adjusts exposure for a wide range ofillumination. There is film in the walnut for a hundredexposures, and the spring for operating its shutter andshifting its film is wound once for all when the filmclip is inserted. I t produces its result in full color.It m ay well be stereoscopic, and record with two spacedglass eyes, for striking improvements in stereoscopictechnique are just around the corner.

A . r e c o r d , if it is to be useful to science, must becontinuously extended, it must be stored, and above allit must be consulted.

there are plenty of mechanical aids with which to effect a transformation inscientific records.

The summation of human experienceis being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the meanswe use for threading through the consequent maze tothe momentarily important item is the same as wasused in the days of square-rigged ships

When Microsoft was choking off Apple's market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac – so that offices were throwing away their designers' Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator – Steve Jobs didn't beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office.

First: competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices. Second: regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less. These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific. Third: self-help. Computers are extremely flexible, and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-complete von Neumann machine, a computer that can run every valid program. That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company's shareholders. Think of a board-room table where someone says, 'I've calculated that making our ads 20% more invasive will net us 2% more revenue per user.' In a digital world, someone else might well say 'Yes, but if we do that, 20% of our users will install ad-blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, forever.' This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory maneuver will prompt their users to google, 'How do I disenshittify this?' Fourth and finally: workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn't mean that tech workers don't have labor power. The historical "talent shortage" of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage over their bosses. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another job – a better job. They knew it, and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures of the tech mission. That's why mottoes like Google's 'don't be evil' and Facebook's 'make the world more open and connected' mattered: they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It's what Fobazi Ettarh calls 'vocational awe,' or what Elon Musk calls being 'extremely hardcore.' Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn't flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, and their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines. So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical 'campuses,' with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered – rather than being made to work like government mules. But for bosses, there's a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission, namely: your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage, and threaten to quit. Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification. The pre-enshittifica

All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then FB discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword.