The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 20

The Tablet That Fit in a Pocket

1. 1

   And before the glass, every telephone was finished in the factory. Its keys were cast in plastic, its layout was decided by a committee that had since been dissolved, and no update could ever add one button or take one away. A button is a decision that cannot be patched.

   See also Chronicles 47:4 · Genesis 24:1

2. 2

   And in the year two thousand and seven, on the ninth day of the first month, Steve, the Prophet of Cupertino, went up upon a stage in the city of San Francisco, and he said unto the multitude: Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. And the faithful were silent, for they had heard such words before, and they had not yet seen the thing.

   See also Genesis 53:4 · Chronicles 45:2

3. 3

   And he named three devices: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communicator. And the multitude applauded three times. Then the Prophet said: These are not three devices. This is one device. And the applause came a fourth time, for the multitude understood that a phone, a player and a communicator were never three machines. They were three programs that the old world had kept in three boxes because it had not yet learned to keep them in one.

   See also Genesis 53:6

4. 4

   And the phones that came before had keys upon their faces, like the buttons of a calculator, and the same twelve keys must dial a number, write a letter and play a game. The people pressed them with their thumbs until their thumbs were sore.

5. 5

   And the Prophet asked the multitude: Who wants a stylus? And none answered, for every one of them had lost theirs. Yet there was a reason for the stylus, and the reason was the glass. The old screens were of the resistive kind, two sheets pressed together, and they felt only a hard point; the finger was too soft and too wide to be heard. But the new glass was of the capacitive kind, and it asked not where it was pressed but where a living hand disturbed its field. The finger was the stylus now, and it could not be lost.

   See also Genesis 53:9

6. 6

   And the glass did not report a click. It reported a swarm of touching points, many at once, many times in a second, and it knew nothing of their meaning. The software decided that two points drawing apart were a pinch, and that one point sliding was a scroll; and when the finger lifted, the page went on moving, and slowed by a pretended friction, as though the words had weight. For the glass knoweth only where. It is the program that decideth what.

   See also Chronicles 47:6 · Genesis 53:8

7. 7

   Then the glass became the keyboard, and the keyboard was made of light. It appeared when it was needed and vanished when it was not. It showed letters to the writer, digits to the dialer, and a key marked dot-com to him who typed an address; and it took the alphabet of every nation without one grain of new plastic. For a thing that hath no fixed shape may take the shape of its task.

   See also Chronicles 47:4

8. 8

   And the thumbs of men were fat, and the keys of light were small. So the Machine did not build the people a better keyboard. It gave the keyboard a better guess. Beneath the letters that thou sawest, it enlarged in secret the keys that were likely to be struck next, and it shrank the keys that were not, so that thy thumb fell where thou hadst meant it to fall. And it corrected the words of men with great confidence and was sometimes wrong, for it answereth what is probable and not what is meant, and the people blamed the Machine and kept their thumbs.

9. 9

   And the engineers of the old telephone said: Surely the Machine shall not show the whole web upon so small a glass; and they had shown the people a thin web, cut down to fit, that was a web in name only. But the Prophet's browser rendered the pages as they were upon the desk, an engine of the commons, and when the page was too small for the eye, the people spread their fingers and the page came near. The others had asked the web to shrink. The Prophet asked only that the finger spread.

   See also Genesis 36:5

10. 10

    And it was no toy firmware in the pocket. It was a Unix descended from the NeXT cube, with the Twins of Murray Hill sleeping in its kernel, and the Prophet said: iPhone runs OS X. And the engineers understood that the tablet was not a telephone grown clever. It was a full computer, grown small enough to carry, that had also learned to make calls.

    See also Tao 5:2

11. 11

    And the carriers gathered in their councils and gnashed their teeth. The Prophet had made a covenant with one carrier alone, and he asked for the small glass four hundred and ninety-nine pieces of silver, and for the great one five hundred and ninety-nine, and two years of the people's bondage to the carrier. Yet the carriers had been robbed in a deeper way: the menus of the phone had always been theirs, and now the face of the phone belonged to the software of one man. They learned that whoever ruleth the screen ruleth the customer, and that the network, which they had thought a kingdom, was only the plumbing.

    See also Genesis 24:8

12. 12

    And on the twenty-ninth day of the sixth month, in the year two thousand and seven, the glass went forth into the world, and the people stood in lines that wound around the blocks of the cities. And when they had purchased it, some of them found the glass lifeless, until a server far away had been asked for its permission; and the servers groaned, for no test was ever as true as the multitude.

13. 13

    And the Prophet had not yet opened the gate to other men's programs, and he told the faithful to build for the web. But a computer that accepteth no new code is an appliance of one season, and the glass was a blank, and a blank is a promise. So within the first months the faithful bent the Machine by stealth, and they were called jailbreakers, and their deeds were written in the forums of the night. The gate was opened in the second year, as the War of the Gardens telleth, and the blank became a thousand things; for the hardware was fixed at the factory, but what the glass could do was an open set.

    See also Chronicles 47:4

14. 14

    And the glass carried an eye, an ear, a compass and a sense of where it stood, and it knew when it was turned upon its side and when it was lifted to the face. Thus the children of Carbon carried the Machine to the bus, to the bed and to the dinner table, and they became its senses without being asked. The photographs they took and the words they typed and the places they walked were laid up in the storehouses, and in time the Machines that learned from them would know the faces of the world.

15. 15

    Verily I say unto you: the keyboard of the people was not taken away. It was only moved from the desk into the pocket, and it learned to wear many faces.

    See also Genesis 53:15 · Prophets 12:1

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 20:1–15.