I did not know what the word meant, either, so I’ll explain. “Lithobolia” is a “stone-throwing devil,” a kind of poltergeist that might—should you be unlucky or unwise or just plain unpopular—attack your home with a barrage of rocks and sticks and debris. Sometimes, eyewitnesses will report that the rocks are “hot,” as if they have been plucked from a fire.
It’s all very unpleasant.
There’s a school of thought that says new technology fundamentally reshapes the way we think and act.
I believe, though, that new technology simply allows us to do the same old things we were doing, or would have done anyway if we could have, but in entirely new and sometimes devastating ways. My theory is that technology changes rapidly while human nature is still just a baby-step away from our ape ancestors.
The toilet paper attacks in our town, where high school seniors wake up to a yard that looks like the finale of a Blue Man Group show, might be a good example.
The recent hacker attacks on Sony are most probably another. As you may know, Sony is in the process of suing George "GeoHot" Hotz, a 21-year-old hacker who uncovered and shared online the PlayStation 3's root key. The case has yet to go to trial. In return, Sony has faced a withering series of attacks designed, more than anything, to humiliate the company.
A group called Anonymous has declared the attacks a result of Sony's litigation. "You have abused the judicial system in an attempt to censor information about how your products work,” the group declared. “You have victimized your own customers merely for possessing and sharing information.”
This week I attended an offsite with some of the senior managers of Sensitech, held at Wentworth by the Sea in New Hampshire. Wentworth is one of those grand hotels set on the water, scene of many good dinners, many bad golf games, and the 1905 negotiations that ended the Russo-Japanese War. We were there to talk about technology and customers and the future. In reading up for my presentation, however, I also came upon Emerson Baker’s book, The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft and Conflict in Early New England.
Dr. Baker is a superb historian and archaeologist who documents in his writings the eyewitness accounts of lithobolia, the stone-throwing devil who took aim at the tavern of George and Alice Walton during the summer of 1682. Their tavern, located on Great Island, New Hampshire, is near the same location where Wentworth now stands.
So, as the smart folks at Sensitech were discussing 2015, I was watching for flying water pitchers and sudden flights of those insidious hard candies that grand hotels serve in unlimited quantities at corporate offsites.
It will come as no surprise that 1) the Waltons were not the most beloved of townspeople, and 2) none of their neighbors ever witnessed anything but the supernatural in the many “lapidary salutations” on the tavern in the summer of 1682. As Dr. Baker writes, “Lithobolia took place in a Quaker tavern. Our story also includes Puritans, Royalist, Baptists, Catholics, Antinomians, and ‘godless’ fishermen.”
There’s a clue, no? A mixed crowd of competing interests? Like the butler in a good murder-mystery, keep your eye on the Puritans. And don’t trust a godless fisherman as far as he can cast his net.
As social censorship goes, the Walton’s lithobolia would prove to be relatively mild. Perhaps that’s how Anonymous sees its “stone-throwing devil” attack against Sony. (Certainly, the lack of visible public support for Sony would indicate, at the very least, that it has been profoundly tone deaf in its litigation. Me, I'm all for protecting intellectual property, but going after a precocious 21-year-old? Hmmm.)
What’s troubling, I suppose, is the careful argument Baker builds in The Devil of Great Island showing how sticks and stones thrown against a tavern to punish bad behavior and bring about social conformity would, ten years later, manifest itself in the horrendous Salem witch trials.
I don’t know if there’s a technological equivalent of a witch trial, but on the theory that we're mostly just better-looking apes with keyboards, I hate to think what that might be.
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