The Sign Above the Shelf: The God in the Wire

In the book I describe what I call the Substitution Test. Three questions. What human good was this technology supposed to serve? What did it actually deliver instead? And who profited from the substitution?

Those three questions govern every chapter. They are applied to the typewriter and the word processor. To the chalkboard and the learning management system. To the handwritten letter and the social media post. To the stethoscope and the electronic health record. And in every case, the answer reveals the same structural pattern: a genuine human need is identified, a technology is developed to address it, the technology achieves dominance, and during that dominance, something essential is lost. Not because the technology is evil, but because the technology is a tool being asked to be a god, and tools cannot be gods, no matter how sophisticated they become.