In 1830, respectable physicians warned that the human body would come apart at thirty miles an hour. In 1889, a Boston paper explained that the telephone would end visiting, conversation, and eventually friendship. In 1954, the United States Senate spent three days investigating comic books. Every one of these fears was sincere, well-argued, and signed by people with credentials. And nobody today can feel a single one of them.

That is the strange thing this book is about. We have not merely stopped fearing trains, wires, and ringing objects in the hallway. We have lost the ability to remember that anyone ever did. The panic does not survive in the archive as panic; it gets refiled. The accurate warnings become public health. The absurd ones become anecdotes without a source. The rest simply vanishes, because the machine became infrastructure, and infrastructure is invisible by design.

The Original Tech Panic traces the whole cycle through its three great cases—the railway, the telegraph, and the telephone—and then runs the same script at speed through radio, cinema, comic books, television, headphones, and the internet, until the listener begins to recognize the sentences word for word. It asks why the fear always aims at the young, why physicians are always the first to sign, and why the panics that turned out to be right are the ones we have most thoroughly forgotten.

Then it does something a history of panic rarely dares. It gives a date. Using the measured interval between mass adoption and the moment the argument simply stops—roughly forty years for railways, thirty for the telegraph, twenty for television, fifteen for the internet—it asks when the current noise about artificial intelligence will end, and explains why that interval keeps shrinking, and why shrinking is not the same as being wrong.