Remember: Nobel. Laureate.
It’s multivalued irony, too. From a 1998 article where Paul Krugman apparently took to task poor technological prophesying:
The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
…Are we at the point yet where we have to explain to the younger generation what a fax machine is?
Via… somebody on Twitter, sorry. The social media conversation moved too quickly for me to do more than get a website browser tab up for me to blog about this later. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to set up a streaming video on my TV for my youngest to watch while I use Skype to record a phone interview with a US House candidate in another time zone; said interview will later be turned into a Youtube video that can be embedded into third-party websites – and hopefully generate a decent amount of national awareness (and online fundraising) for the candidate in question.
Try doing that with a fax machine, Paul Krugman.
Moe Lane