Out of Reach

There’s a line in Close to the Machine where Ellen Ullman is writing about technology and the future, and there’s an image that I haven’t been able to shake in all the years since I read her book:

The future. Right again. The new: irresistible, like it or not.

But I didn’t like it. I was parting ways with it. And right at that moment, I had a glimpse of the great, elusive edge of technology. I was surprised to see that it looked like a giant cosmic Frisbee. It was yellow, rotating at a great rate, and was slicing off into the universe, away from me.

Technology as a toy, always moving away from you, always out of reach.