Technorealism

» see technorealism.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 12 March 1998, twelve people who wrote about technology for a living put their names to a document and a domain. The authors were David Bennahum, Brooke Shelby Biggs, Paulina Borsook, Marisa Bowe, Simson Garfinkel, Steven Johnson, Douglas Rushkoff, Andrew Shapiro, David Shenk, Steve Silberman, Mark Stahlman and Stefanie Syman, with the concept and the first draft coming from Shapiro, Shenk and Johnson. They called the position technorealism, and the argument was that the public conversation about the internet had been captured by two groups of people shouting, and that the interesting ground was between them.

The overview page said this more carefully than any summary can. It accused pundits and self-appointed visionaries of reducing the complexities of the thing to breathless tales of either high-tech doom or cyber-elation. The authors described themselves as technology critics in the same way, and for the same reasons, that others are food critics or literary critics: free to be passionately optimistic about one tool and disdainful of the next, without being for or against the category. What they wanted to expand was what they called the fertile middle ground between techno-utopianism and neo-Luddism.

A week after publication, on 19 March 1998, the Berkman Center at Harvard held a conference around it. An open signup form went on the site and by January 2001 the page could say that over 2,500 people had added their names since 12 March 1998. That is the high-water mark and it arrived early. The press reaction had been mostly uncomprehending or hostile from both directions, and the Washington Post asked in April 1998 why, if the technorealists' ideas were so obvious, we continue to hear so much breathy drivel about how the Internet is remaking reality.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the eight ~

The principles have aged better than the movement did, which is a strange thing to be able to say about a 1998 web document. Seven of the eight headings read like this. Technologies are not neutral. The Internet is revolutionary, but not Utopian. Government has an important role to play on the electronic frontier. Information is not knowledge. Wiring the schools will not save them. The public owns the airwaves and the public should benefit from their use. Understanding technology should be an essential component of global citizenship.

The sixth, left out of that list, is the one that got them shouted at. Information wants to be protected, written as a direct rebuttal of the slogan everyone in 1998 could recite, with the reasoning that authors need enough control to have a reason to make things and the public needs fair use, and that neither survives if the existing framework is simply scrapped. In a year when the loudest voices online were arguing the opposite, putting that in a numbered list under your own name took some nerve.

I was fourteen the year this was published and had just started going online in Turkey on a modem, and none of it reached me or anyone I knew. I read the overview page for the first time in 2026, off an archived capture, as a computer engineer who now works on vision systems that go onto aircraft. Principle one says technologies come loaded with intended and unintended leanings, and that each of us should weigh the biases of the ones we pick. That was published in 1998, eight years before I had broadband.

~ the preservation group ~

Here is where it gets strange. The original site was a frameset, a header bar over an overview page, and overview.html was still being served in January 2001. By April 2005 that file returned 404 and the domain was answering with something else: one merged page carrying the original manifesto text, the original logo, the original navigation to the FAQ and the signup form, and a new block of copy in the middle.

That block explained that this was an important historical site, that on its original launch it raised issues regarding values and technology which were rarely debated elsewhere, and that the site was therefore being preserved and protected for your current and future enjoyment. Credit went to the Historical Site Preservation Group. The copyright on the original content, it noted, remained with David Shenk.

Underneath the preservation notice sat two headings, Content and Open Guides, and below them two linked write-ups. One was a guide to ITIL, the IT infrastructure library. The other was about collaboration for the PRINCE2 project management method. Those guides sat directly beneath the manifesto text for close to twenty years, on the same page, under the same banner.

~ what lives there now ~

The preserved version answered 200 for nineteen more years. The last good capture is 11 September 2024, 5,585 bytes, the manifesto still legible. By 15 October 2024 the same address returned a permanent redirect from a server identifying itself as Redirector, and every capture after that is the shape of a domain that changed hands.

Type technorealism.org today and you land on an Indonesian online slot machine site, 200 kilobytes of it, entirely in Indonesian. The eight principles are gone from the live web and exist only in the Internet Archive. Twenty-six years is a long run for a web address and the manifesto outlasted most of the publications that reviewed it, but the ending is the ordinary one: a renewal nobody paid, and then whoever wanted the name next.

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