A Tale of ‘Trons’ ⇥ aeon.co

David Munns, writing in Aeon:

Sprawling across the 20th century, ‘trons’ marked out humanity’s hubristic desire for techno-supremacy. Today they are an endangered species. So where did the trons go, with their thrill of centralised control over particles, plants or programming? With the end of the Cold War, the term lost much of its political and social power.

There’s something about the “tron” suffix that connotes a specific time and place in history, and Munns captures that story well in this piece. Munns asks what the equivalent today is, and I’m not sure that’s possible to answer yet. Missing vowels reference a specific period on the web — ahem — as does “CamelCase”, but it’s hard to know what today’s identifying language characteristics are without the benefit of hindsight.