Ahead of his time

Steve is discussing with his speechwriter how to approach the announcement of a new phone.

...

Steve: How about I begin by comparing telegramese with SMS abbreviations?

Speechwriter: Been done already.

Steve: Uh huh. OK. Um. How about taking snapshots with a Box Brownie compared with snapping friends on your phone and 3Ging them?

Speechwriter: Been done.

Steve: Damn. OK. Instant messaging now superseded by Twitter?

Speechwriter: Been done.

Steve: Just who was it who said all this before me?

Speechwriter: Samuel Butler.

Steve: I wanna meet this guy.

Speechwriter: Bit late. He died 1902.

Steve: Wow. Ahead of his time. Saw it all coming.

___________

Voiceover

Two strands run through this conversation.

One is Steve desperately hunting for an interesting angle. An analogy that hasn’t yet been revealed. That’s hard.

The second is that the concept of machines being a threat to humans was clearly foreseen and laid out 140 years ago by Samuel Butler in Erewhon.

It is ironical that even intelligent people can overlook the idea that less is more, or even more ominously, The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

Will we become the slaves of machines? Some of us already feel we are.

...

Wherewhere and Erewhon

Hoo has just driven over the Taihape to Napier Road and is pretty pleased with himself.

…

Hoo: I’d never done it before.

Wat: You sixty and you never been Taihape Napier?

Hoo: My father say people go missing. They start at Taihape but they never arrive in Napier. Now I know why.

Wat: You know why?

Hoo: They all went off down Wherewhere Road. No Exit. Massive graveyard at end.

Wat: I heard it because they all end up at Erewhon.

Hoo: Erewhon.

Wat: 20 ks further on. Nowhere spelled backwards. Well, half backwards.

Hoo (shrugging): Who knows?

__________

Voiceover

Although Samuel Butler (1835-1902) did not farm Erewhon Station (he was a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station in Canterbury), out here on the Napier-Taihape Road the old New Zealand exists much as he might have viewed it in the 1860s. Ah the old New Zealand. Everything that Modern Auckland (Sodom and Gomorrah?) is not. Sky, hills, rivers, some sheep, overpowering emptiness. Here, it is hard to believe as Butler prophesied that machines will eventually replace man in ruling the planet and such concerns are hardly the stuff of farmers’ conversations. The farmers might seem to have had a bit of fun with place names in the area but the Wherewhere Road is likely a Maori name.