Ah, 2003. We had JNCOs, we were all friends with Tom, and we hated PowerPoint. But some said it was evil. Others, “the end of reason.” The Atlantic recently published a delightful story about the outsized hatred people had for PowerPoint as it reached critical user mass.
It was going to corrode our minds, degrade communication, and waste our time. Its sudden rise and rapid spread through business, government, and education augured nothing less than “the end of reason,” as one famous artist put it, for better or for worse. In the end, it would even get blamed for the live-broadcast deaths of seven Americans on national television.
It’s a good look back at a simpler kind of techno panic, just as social media was prepping to jam worms into all our brains.
[The Atlantic]
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