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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for

The Spectator and my guest this week is the tech writer Tom Chatfield,

whose new book is Wise Animals,

how technology has made us what we are.

Tom, welcome.

Your book, you start, which just seems to me irresistible,

by defining your terms, by defining technology

in a way you borrow from Douglas Adams.

You tell us a bit about how you're defining technology here and what Adam saw that the rest of us didn't.

Yeah, thanks very much, Sam.

So, yeah, I mean, I'm a lifelong geek, so I had to get that in.

And he wrote a delightful essay, you know, 20, 25 or years ago about why we should all stop

worrying and learn to love the internet.

And he defined technology in the manner of Brian Ferrin, a computer scientist, is the stuff

that doesn't work yet.

So he was talking about the fact that chairs, once upon a time, they were technologists.

We didn't quite know how to make them, the legs didn't work, we fell off occasionally. But gradually, as we worked out what a chair was and how it should be made, it stopped being thought of as a technology and just became part of the fabric of the world. So technology is the shiny, strange, new stuff that we embrace when we're young, worry about

terribly as soon as we get into about our 30s, and then gradually maybe admit wasn't that bad

after all.

...