Passages

Abstract

Seymour Papert's Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas is many things, though most strikingly, seen in the right light, a tragedy: it showed a world on the cusp of a revolution in how we learn and how we live, brought about by the computer. That world did not, so far as I can tell, come to be, though the reasons it did not come to be are not entirely clear. Perhaps the failure was overdetermined; a case where, as Robert Irwin says in The Arabian Nightmare, the tragedy "was determined and more than determined. There are always more causes than events." I prefer not to think about it, really.