Twitter

Ellen Ullman, an early computer programmer, who happens to be a woman of color, has written about her experiences in the high tech world in Life in Code:  A Personal History of Technology (Farrrar, Straus& Giroux).  

In 1998 she had written, “I fear for the world the internet is creating.  Before the advent of the Web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in far-fetched ideas, you had to go out into the desert, or live on a compound in the mountains, or move from one badly furnished room to another in a series of safe houses.”  

She was prescient.  Today there are all kinds of weird groups and cults that find each other and flock together on the internet.  Evil spreads so easily.

I also love her description of Twitter.  She considers it a broadcaster of “thought farts.”