Future Tense Newsletter: Technology Is Cyclical

Over the past couple of days, I've been thinking about the late, great 30 Rock--in particular, an episode from Season 1. Dennis Duffy (Dean Winters), the marvelously terrible boyfriend of Liz Lemon (Tina Fey), is a bit of a technology entrepreneur--by which I mean he is the Beeper King, the last beeper salesman on Manhattan. "Which is cool," his then-girlfriend Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) tells a skeptical friend. But when he tries to sell beepers to her staff of TV writers, she loses it and tells him to leave. "You work in a business. Businesspeople need beepers," he insists.