Surrendering to the Machines: An Early Adopter’s Doubts

We’ve always been early adopters in my house. My mother worked for IBM — and even though I qualify as a “geriatric Millennial,” we were on the internet by the time I was in third grade. This was before America Online. It was the days of online services like Prodigy or, my favorite at the time, Promenade, which existed only from 1990 to 1994. By age twelve, I was volunteer-moderating message boards dedicated to the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

My brothers-in-law and I text each other about the ambitions of bleeding-edge companies like Anthropic or SpaceX. I run virtual networks at home to impose some rules on my children’s use — and our own use — of the internet. I’m pro–data center, of course. I wonder if Elon Musk is right that they can be built in space.

About the Author

Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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We’ve always been early adopters in my house. My mother worked for IBM — and even though I qualify as a “geriatric Millennial,” we were on the internet by the time I was in third grade. This was before America Online. It was the days of online services like Prodigy or, my favorite at the time, Promenade, which existed only from 1990 to 1994. By age twelve, I was volunteer-moderating message boards dedicated to the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

My brothers-in-law and I text each other about the ambitions of bleeding-edge companies like Anthropic or SpaceX. I run virtual networks at home to impose some rules on my children’s use — and our own use — of the internet. I’m pro–data center, of course. I wonder if Elon Musk is right that they can be built in space.