Eloi, Morlocks, and Hackers

So I've been reading a couple of essays by Neal Stephenson. The first is an annotated version of "In The Beginning Was The Command Line," which contains the following passage:

Contemporary culture is a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, except that it's been turned upside down. In The Time Machine the Eloi were an effete upper class, supported by lots of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological wheels turning. But in our world it's the other way round. The Morlocks are in the minority, and they are running the show, because they understand how everything works. The much more numerous Eloi learn everything they know from being steeped from birth in electronic media directed and controlled by book-reading Morlocks.

This is an interesting view, but I think it misses something important about the world. In a sense, we are all Morlocks and Eloi. Stephenson knows his way around a computer, but he doesn't have a solid grasp of economics. I imagine he would be completely lost in a courtroom. He's a technological Morlock and a legal Eloi. Plenty of lawyers are the opposite. Adam Smith, a philosophical and economic Morlock, explained the advantages of specialization. Today, though, if not then (Franklin and Jefferson were perhaps the last comprehensive Morlocks, and even that is stretching it a bit), intense specialization has made Eloi of all of us. It would be impossible to learn any significant fraction of the information sloshing around the world in a lifetime. We select our specialties and become Morlocks in them. In everything else we remain Eloi, dependent on a social structure that gives us access to Morlocks and their services.

This is not to deny the validity of Stephenson's point. Many people resist becoming Morlocks at all, and see the world through a glass darkly. Others gulp down information and become Morlocks as much as possible. It's crucial to remember, though, that everyone is an Eloi with regard to almost everything in the world. The question is not whether you're an Eloi (you are), but whether you have a drive to expand your Morlock side as far as possible. That is the distinction that separates, for me, the interesting people from the boring.