Digital Minimalism

part of the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence may
not be transmitted by electricity.”
In Winchester’s telling, this was a “vatic revelation”
for the failed painter, who immediately understood the
possibilities of electronic communication. On arrival in
New York, he rushed to his studios to begin the long
process of experimentation needed to make practical the
deceptively simple idea hatched on the Sully. Twelve
frenetic years later, in May of 1844, Morse set up his
telegraph key on a table in the chamber of the United
States Supreme Court, where he was surrounded by a
small group of influential legislators and government
officials. An electrical wire, augmented on regular
intervals with signal-boosting relays, connected Morse to
his associate and fellow inventor Alfred Vail, who was
stationed forty miles away in a railway station outside of
Baltimore.

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It was time for Morse to make his first major
demonstration of his invention. All he needed was an
inaugural message. Based on a suggestion from the
daughter of the patent commissioner who had supported
Morse’s innovation, he tapped a well-known phrase from
the end of the book of Numbers: WHAT HATH GOD
WROUGHT?
As Winchester notes, these words, when considered in
isolation, “formed a simple declarative exclamation, a
statement of Samuel Morse’s faith.” But in the context of
the transformation this invention and its successors
would spark, it was better understood as a “suitably
portentous epigraph for an era of change that now
commenced with unimagined speed and unimaginable
consequences.”
Humans have been improving their world with
invention since before the beginning of recorded history.
But there’s something about the innovations driving
electronic communication that make them, as
Winchester writes, “so mystifyingly different from what
had gone before.” Mechanical wonders fit the physical
understanding of the world etched into our brains
through millions of years of evolution. A charging steam
locomotive might be awe inspiring, but it also
fundamentally makes sense: fire creates steam that
pushes the train’s pistons forward.
A telegraph message or phone call or email or social
media ping is somehow different. We lack an intuition
for flowing electricity and the complex components that
control it, and the concept of back-and-forth
conversation existing outside the context of two people
talking in close proximity is completely foreign to our
species’ history. The result is that we’ve always struggled
to imagine the consequences of the electronic
communication revolution started by Samuel Morse, and
often find ourselves scrambling to make ex post facto
sense of its impacts on our world.

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As noted in an earlier chapter, Henry David Thoreau’s
reaction to the telegraph boom that followed Morse’s
1844 demonstration was to remark that we’re so eager to
build a line between Maine and Texas that we never
stopped to ask why these two states needed to be
connected in the first place. Though dated in its