Free Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) by Walter Kirn Page A

would bring the inert beige box to life.
    But there was no evidence that anyone read the books.
    While we waited to learn to program by inspiration, we sought a breakthrough using trial and error. The effort failed because we lacked a usable definition of error. That’s when we stopped touching the device and chose to regard it as an icon or a totem. Our classes turned into speculative chats about the wonders the object might perform if instead of addressing it in COBOL or FORTRAN, we could interact with it in English. To heighten the atmosphere of possibility, we kept the thing plugged in. This warmed its obscurely coiled and bundled insides, releasing unappetizing chemical vapors.
    “Say we could feed it every single play in Osceola’s offensive playbook. Maybe it would think up perfect defensive plays. And say it was hooked to earphones in our helmets and told us exactly how to run them. We might take state next year.”
    Mr. Ka looked from Nils, the speaker, our starting center linebacker, to me, an occasional blocker during punt returns. “Assuming the Apple could do that, how would you feel?”
    “Happy. Great. Why not?”
    “You wouldn’t feel … humbled ? ”
    “I would,” said Pat, another starting player. He was stretched out at his desk beside the mechanism, moving one hand in circles above its head as though polishing its invisible halo. “I’d feel like, hey, I’m not needed, why play football? Why get your bell rung and bruise your shins instead of just goofing off with Pac-Man and drinking an ice-cold Schlitz?”
    “Hey, I know,” a guy said. “Picture this, okay?” He stood and approached the Apple with widespread arms, softly fluttering his hands, like wings. It was a courtship dance, it seemed. “We win its trust. We come in peace, we tell it. We want it to help us read coma victims’ minds, say, or write another Shakespeare play. Then, very slowly, careful not to scare it, we reach out for its little plastic throat”—he curved his hands into a choking position—“and throttle it till it starts to spark and shit. Smoke rolls out of it, bells ring, sirens wail. The cockpits of jet planes go haywire, they explode, missile silos open by themselves, and a dozen Chinese robots go berserk and kill all the pandas at the zoo.”
    “My hour hand just hit ten,” said Mr. Ka. “Tomorrow, gentlemen. Excellent. Most excellent. We didn’t waste our time today.”
    A month or two into the class I grew dissatisfied. Yes, they were pleasant, our hours of dreamy bullshit, and yes, the Apple was quite a talisman, but did our mutual agreement to give up trying to operate the thing mean, perhaps, that the world had changed around us while we, for the first time in our young lives, had rejected change? It hadn’t been this way during the Apollo years. We’d built model rockets then, we’d studied weightlessness. Shouldn’t we be taking that approach? Perhaps, but we were uninspired. Computers, larger models than the Apple, existed already and other people ran them, a situation we found acceptable because it allowed us the freedom to live in ignorance while receiving the benefits of modernization. We were only sixteen but somehow we’d grown old.
    “This is Jason, class,” said Mr. Ka late in the semester. The boy was a tadpole-shaped twelve-year-old, all head. “Jason will help us relate to the computer.”
    “It’s pretty outrageous, this machine,” said Jason. “Move your chairs in. Form a circle, guys.”
    The exhibition unveiled no technical mysteries, but it did help me understand the term “conservative” as I’d once heard it used by a friend’s father while he was watching the TV news. A conservative was a person who stopped adjusting once adjustment brought him no vital benefits. The commandment to us from kindergarten on had been to grow, to expand ourselves, to stretch, but there was another option, too, I saw. One could let others cope with novelty and concentrate on the