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technophobes. Far from it. They\'re ideologues. They have a concept of what right-living consists of, and they\'ll use any technology that serves that ideal -- and mercilessly eschew any technology that would subvert it. There\'s nothing wrong with driving the wagon to the next farm when you want to hear from your son, so there\'s no need to put a phone in the kitchen. On the other hand, there\'s nothing right about your livestock dying for lack of care, so a cellphone that can call the veterinarian can certainly find a home in the horse barn. 
 
For me, right-living is the 101-key, QWERTY, computer-centric mediated lifestyle. It\'s having a bulky laptop in my bag, crouching by the toilets at a strange airport with my AC adapter plugged into the always-awkwardly-placed power source, running software that I chose and installed, communicating over the wireless network. I use a network that has no incremental cost for communication, and a device that lets me install any software without permission from anyone else. Right-living is the highly mutated, commodity-hardware- based, public and free Internet. I\'m QWERTY-Amish, in other words. 
 
I\'m the kind of perennial early adopter who would gladly volunteer to beta test a neural interface, but I find myself in a moral panic when confronted with the 12-button keypad on a cellie, even though that interface is one that has been greedily adopted by billions of people worldwide, from strap-hanging Japanese schoolgirls to Kenyan electoral scrutineers to Filipino guerrillas in the bush. The idea of paying for every message makes my hackles tumesce and evokes a reflexive moral conviction that text-messaging is inherently undemocratic, at least compared to free-as-air email. The idea of only running the software that big-brother telco has permitted me on my handset makes me want to run for the hills. 
 
The thumb-generation who can tap out a text-message under their desks while taking notes with the other hand -- they\'re in for it, too. The pace of accelerated change means that we\'re all of us becoming wed to interfaces -- ways of communicating with our tools and our world -- that are doomed, doomed, doomed. The 12-buttoners are marrying the phone company, marrying a centrally controlled network that requires permission to use and improve, a Stalinist technology whose centralized choke points are subject to regulation and the vagaries of the telcos. Long after the phone companies have been out-competed by the pure and open Internet (if such a glorious day comes to pass), the kids of today will be bound by its interface and its conventions. 
 
The sole certainty about the future is its Amishness. We will all bend our brains to suit an interface that we will either have to abandon or be left behind. Choose your interface -- and the values it implies -- carefully, then, before you wed your thought processes to your fingers\' dance. It may be the one you\'re stuck with.  
 
$$$$ 
 
Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books 
 
(Paper for the O\'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, San Diego, February 12, 2004) 
 
Forematter: 
 
This talk was initially given at the O\'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference [ http://conferences.oreillynet.com/et2004/ ], along with a set of slides that, for copyright reasons (ironic!) can\'t be released alongside of this file. However, you will find, interspersed in this text, notations describing the places where new slides should be loaded, in [square-brackets]. 
 
For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions I\'ve had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the presentations at this event called this talk, \"eBooks Suck Right Now,\" [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don\'t think it\'s true. 
 
No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I\'d
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