Bewildering Stories Editorial

by Jerry Wright

What Now?

I dunno. I just work here. And darn little of that. Well, lessee... I need to write 1000 words on some "I Love Tech" item. And you know? Sometimes it is darn hard to love Tech. Remember "Computers: The labor saving device"? Yes, computers were going to make it easier on us, do away with paperwork, and create a stress-free environment. Like fun!

Because a man can do the same amount of figuring and writing with a computer in perhaps a fourth of the time needed before, did the work needed decrease by three-quarters? If you think so, you don't know the ways of bureaucracies. No. Guess what? We want four-fold the paperwork we had before. And the trees started their paper-transform increased by an order of magnitude. (By the way, any figures you see in this article are purely rhetorical, and are pulled out of the air. This makes them no less real. Just not accurate.)

Remember novels, fiction, in the before days? Writing was hard work. Putting words on paper, moving them around, rewriting, cajoling the thoughts out of the brain. The physical act was just time consuming. Some authors, such as Erle Stanley Gardner, had a secretary. And acting as a transcriptionist, she would write (probably in shorthand) as fast as ESG could create. And so we have a lot of Perry Mason mysteries, as well as the other well-loved characters in his other books. But they were short (compared to today). A hundred and fifty, two hundred pages. Done several times a year. That is a lot of writing.

But now we have word processing by computer. The quantity has increased massively. The quality? Well, I'm reminded of one of the little sayings that sprang up after the Internet had been around for a while: "There is an old saying that if a million monkeys typed on a million keyboards for a million years, eventually all the works of Shakespeare would be produced. Now, thanks to Usenet, we know this is not true."

Now anyone with a computer and software can create a 1000 page novel. And they do. And sadly, some of them get published, proving once again Fred Allen's dictum: "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Public".

Of course... After doing a bit of research... Goodness, I love the Internet... I find this:

Mencken is probably best known for one quote: "Nobody's ever gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the general public." Or underestimating the ability of people to quote him.
What he actually said, in the Chicago Tribune on September 19, 1926 was: "No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."
Not very well phrased was it? No wonder he was never a stand-up.

Ah... H.L Mencken. Foo.

And with that... I bid you adieu.