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We have reaped myriad benefits as citizens of the new Republic of Technology. Our American standard of living is a familiar name for these daily blessings. Our increased longevity, the decline of epidemics, the widening of literacy, the reduced hours of labor, the widening of political participation, our house hold conveniences, the reduction of the discomforts of winter and of summer, the growth of schools and colleges and universities, the flourishing of libraries and museums, unprecedented opportunities to explore the world — all are byproducts of the New Obsolescence and the New Convergence. They have be come so familiar that they are undervalued. But some strange fruit is apt to grow in the fertile orchards of our technological progress. If we remain aware of the special risks in the com munity of our future, we will run less risk of losing these un precedented benefits that we have come to take for granted.
Here are a few of the forces at work in the Republic of Technology that will shape our American lives in the next century:
TECHNOLOGY INVENTS NEEDS AND EXPORTS PROBLEMS. We will be misled if we think that technology will be directed primarily to satisfying "demands" or "needs" or to solving recognized "problems." There was no "demand" for the telephone, the automobile, radio or television. It is no accident that our nation — the most advanced in technology — is also the most advanced in advertising. Technology is a way of multiplying the unnecessary. And advertising is a way of persuading us that we didn't know what we needed. Working together, technology and advertising create progress by developing the need for the unnecessary. The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world. There wants will be created not by "human nature" or by century-old yearnings, but by technology itself.
TECHNOLOGY CREATES MOMENTUM AND IS IRREVERSIBLE.