---
title: "Comment for The New History of Modern Computing by P. Ceruzzi and T. Haigh"
date: 2026-01-31T06:37:16+01:00
draft: false
---

Paul Ceruzzi and Thomas Haigh have taken the courtesy to tell the history of computing inside their brand new, 2021 book, albeit not without a twist. 
Dedicating a whopping 545 pages of text to solely to computers, you would expect the authors to like the topic, but make no mistake -- neither is a technology sympathizer. 
What might come off as even more unexpected, is that I agree with the points they make in their arguably the most negative, 15th chapter. 

It begins with the example of Elizabeth Holmes and the well-known Theranos fraud. 
Having actually been fairly recently sentenced to 14 years of prison for her crimes, such an example is no way to optimistically end a book. 
But it shortly highlights a recurring problem: _rapid improvements in computer technology had not led to proportionally great social advances or economic developments_.
Ceruzzi and Haigh are entirely right.
On top of this, they provide several more examples, including, quote: _From 2008 and 2018, productivity growth in the US averaged just 1.3 percent a year, well below the 2.7 percent achieved from 2000 to 2007._
While I disagree with the authors on the impact of the computer on society, their comments on negative consequences of the computer on our daily lives are straight on point.
_The typical American worker of 2018 was no better paid, after adjusting for inflation, than the typical American worker of the 70s._
It's pretty hard to argue with such a statement. 
In short, both authors conclude that technology does not benefit the ordinary man, but only the so-called "top 0.1\%", _whose income after tax quintupled from 1980 to 2018_. 
Needless to say, the rest of the chapter is narrated in a similar tone. 
But to more deeply reflect on its relevance to my own personal experiences, I'll try to connect it to the recent workshop I participated in at my university.

Let me begin by emphasizing that the workshop was very well prepared. 
The, more or less, 4 hours I spent working on the topics the presenters deemed important were well spent. 
During the 2 presentations, both speakers knew what they were talking about, had a clear agenda for the meeting and engaged with the audience. 
As such, I cannot say a negative word about the organizational aspect -- but from my personal standpoint of view, it is a completely different story. 

The workshop centered around UGC (User-Generated-Content). 
This is a fancy word for creating short (30 seconds to 1 minute) videos with up-beat music and AI-generated captions meant to attract the short attention span of the average viewer (adequately deemed "the goldfish"), and promote a certain product.
The most common embodiment of this concept is a TikTok.

Firstly, my attention was immediately grabbed to my classmates behaviour when the presenter played 3 popular UGC TikToks on the classroom projector. 
With roughly 40 people in the classroom, including the staff members, the very moment the first video was played, every single person, with no exception averted their attention towards the projector. 
It was like a scene from a sci-fi horror movie -- one moment everyone was talking over each other, and in the next all 40 heads in the classroom went quiet and synchronously turned towards the single big screen. 
Nobody made a single sound for the terrifying 3 minutes it took to play those videos, which for me seemed like an eternity.
This event reminded me of George Orwell's _1984_ and the recurring theme of screens in the book for propaganda purposes and the surveillance of book's population. 
I think the parallel is hard to miss.

Afterwards, we were given as a team a task to create such a video promoting a randomly selected chocolate protein bar. 
Long story short, we were given roughly 45 minutes to do so, together with creating a storyboard, recording ourselves with the given product and editing the final result. 
The outcome was a 1 minute TikTok promoting a protein bar not a single in person in our team knew even existed an hour ago. 

This is precisely why at this point it crossed the line for me and I refused to actively engage anymore in the workshop. 
The techniques we were advised to use to improve our video exploited the low attention span of the viewers. 
A _hook_ -- that's how the first 5 second, attention-grabbing stop-motion of the TikTok was described to us. 
As such, my team successfully _hooked_ the audience (classmates) by video advertising a product which they had practically zero idea about. 
To top it off, I took the courtesy to read its nutritional value afterwards, which for e.g., included palm oil, responsible for the hundreds of thousands of acres of deforestation in the Amazon. 
With no concern or afterthought about the potential impact of our advertisement, my team mates  submitted the video to a shared, available-for-all Google Drive. 

It seems to me society just unconditionally accepts the electronic technology it is handed.
It became widely accepted to trust technologies simply because they are hyped or popular. 
Why have things turned out this way? Does it have to remain like this? 
I really do not know.