Redmond, home to the Microsoft Corportation, is known worldwide as a center for high technology. The town’s fame has come about only in recent times. For more than a century, Redmond was seen as just another small settlement that grew into suburbia.
The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of technological utopianism — the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world.