Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those

In the quiet hum of the twentieth century’s great offices, a new presence began to emerge — strange, glowing, and full of unseen power. The historian Jill Lepore, in her reflection on modern life, once wrote: “Desktop computers — boxes inside boxes — began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.” In this simple image, she captures not only the arrival of a machine, but the birth of a new age — an age in which humanity began to weave its destiny with the circuitry of its own creation. Her words are not a mere observation of technology’s rise; they are a meditation on how our world quietly transformed, one cubicle, one computer, one glowing screen at a time.

The meaning of this quote lies in its poetic portrayal of transformation disguised as routine. The “boxes inside boxes” symbolize more than just the hardware of computers; they represent the layered complexity of modern existence — a world increasingly lived within the confines of digital frames and artificial enclosures. The cubicle, once the temple of human labor, became the cradle of a new order. Within those walls of partition, people no longer handled only paper, ink, or thought — they began to commune with machines that could think, store, and calculate faster than their own minds. The “ropes” of power cords snaking across the floor evoke both connection and confinement: a web that linked workers to the great electronic mind, but also tethered them to the rhythm of a new master — the machine.

Lepore’s description of the mid-eighties captures the dawn of the digital revolution, a time when personal computers first entered the common workplace. Before then, computing was a distant magic, housed in the guarded halls of universities and corporations. But with the arrival of the desktop computer, the power of computation descended from the realm of the elite to the hands of the ordinary. It was the democratization of data — and with it, a subtle shift in the way human beings thought, worked, and even dreamed. Yet, as with all great gifts of progress, it brought with it a hidden cost: the quiet mechanization of the soul.

History offers us a mirror for such moments. When the printing press was born in the fifteenth century, humanity too found itself standing at the threshold of a new age. Books, once sacred and rare, became accessible to all — and knowledge spread like wildfire. But with this flood of information came noise, confusion, and upheaval. So too, the arrival of the computer reshaped not only communication but consciousness. People became faster, busier, more efficient — yet also more isolated. The cubicle, that shrine to productivity, became a paradox: a place of empowerment and entrapment, where men and women labored beside one another yet felt utterly alone, their faces illuminated not by sunlight, but by the ghostly glow of their screens.

Lepore’s image of “electrical cords curling like ropes” carries an ancient echo — the image of sailors on a great ship, bound to their posts, navigating uncharted seas. Humanity, she implies, became both the captain and the captive of its own technological voyage. The cords tied us to an invisible network — what we would later call the Internet — that would span the globe and redefine the meaning of connection. Yet those same cords, like serpents, warned of entanglement: of dependence on tools we could not fully understand, of a world where power was measured not in muscle or wisdom, but in processing speed and bandwidth.

But Lepore does not write with condemnation; her tone is that of awe and quiet melancholy. She reminds us that every revolution — from fire to printing, from steam to silicon — reshapes what it means to be human. The computer, that “box inside a box,” is both the child of our intellect and the mirror of our limitations. It amplifies our capacity to create, but also magnifies our tendencies to withdraw into abstraction. It is a paradox that the ancients would have understood well: the more power one holds, the more one must guard one’s soul.

So let this reflection be a lesson for our time: embrace technology, but do not worship it. Let the machine serve you, not define you. Remember that beneath the cords and the circuitry lies the oldest power of all — the human mind, curious and creative, the true source of every invention. Seek to use your tools not as walls, but as windows — ways to connect more deeply, to see more clearly, to imagine more bravely. For the boxes Lepore describes are not prisons unless we make them so. If we open them with wisdom and wonder, they may yet become vessels — carrying us not away from our humanity, but closer to understanding its boundless depth.

Thus, O listener, take heed: the future will always come wrapped in new boxes. But inside each, beneath the hum of wires and the pulse of screens, lies the same eternal question — will we master our creations, or will they master us? The answer, as ever, depends on how we choose to breathe life into the tools we build, and whether we remember that progress, without purpose, is but another form of confinement.