A Declaration of Cyber-War

"They faced a crisis which did not yet have a name, but which seemed, at first, to have the potential to bring industrial society to a halt."

Hmm .... Did it now? And, did that happen?

And from where do we read this? 'Vanity Fair' you say?

That magazine is for what? For some especially emotional women, and a few similar men, worrying about their feelings about fashion?

Do the readers or the writers there actually know anything about computing? Or, instead, is all the content just yet another old media application of formula fiction as in "The sky is falling" or

"Oh, we got trouble. Right here in River City. Trouble starts with a 'T', And that rhymes with a 'V', And that stands for 'virus'."

to grab people by the heart, the gut, or below the belt to get eyeballs for the ads?

More generally, the content is from old media 'writers' who, in old media, as in McLuhan's "the medium is the message", tried to write for the 'least common denominator' (LCD) of an audience of millions.

And what is that LCD? Technical? No. Emotional? Yes. Only a small fraction of the population is very technical, but a huge fraction is quite emotional. So, the "message" was all emotionalism and not rationalism and certainly not rationalism about technology.

Generally, then for any person A who works in field X, actually to get paid in field X the person A has to know something about field X, know more than the LCD of some audience of millions independent of X. Then when person A reads some old media LCD content about X, they conclude that the writer didn't know anything about X and once again tosses aside old media.

Here on HN we see the pattern clearly: It's super tough to find anyone writing for old media who can write as much as a single, significantly meaningful paragraph on computing without looking uninformed on computing.

So we are seeing "the medium is the message" again: Now the "medium" is the Internet which permits focused content from experts in that content, and the role of 'generalist writers' using formula fiction to grab people emotionally with LCD content is fading away.

With irony, Dear Vanity Fair: This time the sky actually is falling, on old media.

'Vanity Fair' RIP.