Long before the Y2K panic or today’s panic over the internet replacing television, there was the happy talk of “Computer Critters,” a series of PSAs that ABC ran in the mid-1980s during their Saturday morning cartoon block. The message is that everything we use has a computer, computers do everything, that they’re going to take over our lives, and that this is a good thing. As a child, I appreciated the commercial because I myself was increasingly dependent on a computer (I wrote well on the word processor, but not so well by hand) and this crocodile person reassured me that it was okay. But even at the time, I thought there was something a little sinister about being so upbeat about the whole thing.