David lafontaine's

I’ve fallen prey to the digital triumphalism. I’ll admit it. It’s really easy to hang on the rim and hoot, when you’re on the outside looking in. This provokes a reaction much like the one we’re seeing here.

The digital enthusiasts feel like the crews on lifeboats, trying to pick up survivors after the Titanic has gone down, only the survivors are shooting at them with pistols, yelling “You smug bastards in the lifeboats! You don’t know what it’s like here in the freezing water! Sure, it’s easy to be warm & dry when you’re in a lifeboat! Bang!”

Meanwhile, to the guys in the water, what they see is the lifeboat crew saying “Sure, we’ll give you a hand up. But first you have to sing a tune apologizing for how stupid you were while we pee all over your head. And maybe we’ll smack you around with the boathook. But you have it coming.”

And what both sides are missing is that while the lifeboat is a good stop-gap solution, the oars seem to be missing, and the crew in the lifeboat is arguing amongst themselves as to which direction they would row in, should the oars ever be found, while others say that rowing is so old-school, and that what we should concentrate on is inventing a nuclear reactor that would provide endless propulsive energy, while still others think that the whole lifeboat thing is wrong, and we should jump back in the water in the hopes of evolving gills.