Boyle’s point is that most of us would have chosen the Minitel and Britannica models and thus denied the world the Web and Wikipedia. The cultural agoraphobia from which most of us suffer leads us always to overemphasize the downsides of openness and lack of central control, and to overvalue the virtues of order and authority.
That is what is rendering us incapable of harnessing the benefits of networked technology. Industries and governments are wasting incalculable amounts of money and energy in Canute-like resistance to the oncoming wave when what they should be doing is figuring out ways to ride it.
Which brings us back to dear old Snow. In 1959 he argued that the gap between his “two cultures” was holding us back from applying technology to solve the problems of the world.
Fifty years on, we’re still in the same boat. The cultures have changed, but the problem remains.
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