Whisky Van Gogh Go

Last summer I cited Brian McGrory of the Boston Globe to illustrate the concept of a “newspaper columnist,” the pre-Internet incarnation of a troll, the intellectual equivalent of a child who throws feces at the walls in a desperate cry for attention and pageviews. 

Along a similar vein, Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post declared that the man who co-invented the personal computer, which put the computing power of NASA on every desk in the world*, and twenty years later put even greater power in every pocket* — Robert Samuelson calls this person a historical footnote.

I could be wrong. Perhaps Robert Samuelson believes that the ability to have any knowledge in the world, at any time, with an interface that my two-year-old nephew has mastered, is trivial. Siddhartha might have agreed. And if Robert Samuelson is of the opinion that the Internet and Western Civilization will collapse in a hundred years and even Henry Ford shall be as Ozymandius, well that’s a valid belief too, I should give him a pass.

But if Robert Samuelson is not ignorant of the transformative power of personal computers, and he believes that our society is not going to revert to a nation of farmers, then he is a 65-year-old economist who has not been toilet trained.

* yes I’m being hyperbolic