I was a musician before I was anything else. That's how I first used technology-not through code or commerce, but through sound. In the late 1980s, I stood in an "electronic music studio" at Bennington College in Vermont, staring at a new keyboard called The Synclavier. I didn't know how it worked, but I could feel what sounds it wanted to make. It wasn't just a machine-it was a co-conspirator. It could emulate, sample, sequence, and distort. I could pull emotion out of circuitry. At the t...