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Nothing can be uninvented. This tragicomic fact will dominate our lives as citizens of the Republic of Technology. While any device can be made obsolete, no device can be forgotten or erased from the arsenal of technology. While the currents of politics and of culture can be stopped, deflected, or even reversed, technology is irreversible. In recent years, Germany, Greece and some other countries have gone from democracy to dictatorship and back to democracy. But we cannot go back and forth be tween the kerosene lamp and the electric light. Our inability to uninvent will prove ever more troublesome as our technology proliferates and refines more and more unimagined, seemingly irrelevant wants. Driven by "needs" for the unnecessary, we remain impotent to conjure the needs away. Our Aladdin's lamp of technology makes myriad new genii appear, but cannot make them disappear. The automobile — despite all we have learned of its diabolism — cannot be conjured away. The most we seem able to do is to make futile efforts to appease the automobile —by building parking temples on choice urban real estate and by deferring to the automobile with pedestrian overpasses and tunnels. We drive miles — and when we are there we walk miles — all for the convenience of the airplane. Our national politics is shaped more and more by the imperious demands of television. Our negotiations with the Genie of Television all seem to end in unconditional surrender. We live, and will live, in a world of increasingly involuntary commitments.
TECHNOLOGY ASSIMILATES. The Republic of Technology, ruthlessly egalitarian, will accomplish what the prophets, political philosophers and revolutionaries could not. Already it as similates times and places and peoples and things — a faithful color reproduction of the Mona Lisa, the voice and image of Franklin D. Roosevelt, of Winston Churchill, or of Gandhi. You too can have a ringside seat at the World Series, at Wimbledon — or anywhere else. Without a constitutional amendment or a decision of the Supreme Court, technology forces us to equalize our experience. More than ever before, the daily experience of Americans will be created equal — or at least ever more similar.