"The great advance of personal computers was not the computing power per se but the fact that it brought it right to your face, that you had control over it, that were confronted with it and could steer it"
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Kelly is smuggling a deceptively political claim into what sounds like a tidy tech-history lesson: the PC mattered less as a faster calculator than as a new arrangement of power. “Not the computing power per se” punctures the macho mythology of specs and speed. The real “advance” is proximity and agency. “Right to your face” is almost confrontational, implying that a computer isn’t neutral infrastructure humming in the background; it’s an interface that demands choices. You don’t merely benefit from computation, you negotiate with it.
The verb chain does the work: “control,” “confronted,” “steer.” Control suggests ownership. Confrontation suggests friction, even responsibility. Steering suggests direction without total mastery, like driving a car in traffic: you’re empowered, but within constraints. That’s an editor’s way of framing a cultural shift. The PC didn’t just enable tasks; it trained a public in interactive thinking - menus, files, commands, later links and feeds. It turned “users” into a category with expectations.
Context matters. Kelly comes out of the Wired-era optimism that personal tech decentralizes authority: from mainframes run by institutions to machines on desks, from gatekeepers to tinkerers. The subtext, read from today, is bittersweet. The PC put computing in your hands; the cloud and the phone often put it back in someone else’s. That makes his emphasis on “right to your face” feel prophetic: the screen is where freedom and capture both happen, and the decisive question is still who gets to steer.
The verb chain does the work: “control,” “confronted,” “steer.” Control suggests ownership. Confrontation suggests friction, even responsibility. Steering suggests direction without total mastery, like driving a car in traffic: you’re empowered, but within constraints. That’s an editor’s way of framing a cultural shift. The PC didn’t just enable tasks; it trained a public in interactive thinking - menus, files, commands, later links and feeds. It turned “users” into a category with expectations.
Context matters. Kelly comes out of the Wired-era optimism that personal tech decentralizes authority: from mainframes run by institutions to machines on desks, from gatekeepers to tinkerers. The subtext, read from today, is bittersweet. The PC put computing in your hands; the cloud and the phone often put it back in someone else’s. That makes his emphasis on “right to your face” feel prophetic: the screen is where freedom and capture both happen, and the decisive question is still who gets to steer.
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| Topic | Technology |
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