If humans wanted sharper teeth, they knapped flint to a knife. A thicker shell; carve a shield out of wood or weave plant fibres into a coat. You could think it up in an afternoon, tell everyone about in a day, have it everywhere in a month. (The inter-relationships between language and technology are severely in need of a good rummage, but, y'know, linguists are a tribe who tread their own path.). So, technology turns us from creatures that have to adapt at the speed of biology, to ones that can adapt at the speed of making things. Evolution is about creating advantages better than the other critter, so we're now really, really, really good at evolution. Of course we've taken over the planet.
That alone would make the history of technology just the juiciest antelope to hunt - the grand view. But the tiniest stuff is equally delicious.A medical friend tells me the story about how, when she was doing her first house work in a London hospital, the common room got its first colour TV. It had just been installed; it was a Saturday afternoon, and five doctors were clustered around the set excitedly watching the football. Two men in brown shop-keeper coats came in, unplugged the telly - "Sorry, gents, there's a fault, we have to take it away" - and walked out with it.
There was no fault. The men were audacious thieves. It was worth going to all that risk and trouble to take a TV out from under hte noses of its owners, because the thing was worth so much money. Now, nobody steals them any more: property crime in the NHS is down! TVs-as-a-thing, despite being just as much a part of our culture as before, have almost vanished.They're paper-thin. They cost very little, and their resale price is even less. What was an enormous, specialised collection of esoterica - a mammoth vacuum-filled glass tube with a particle accelerator built-in, fed by a 25 thousand volt power supply, connected to machinery with hundreds of adjustments and thousands of individual bits - is now a couple of chips costing tuppence and a glass panel that's printed with chemicals the same way a newspaper is printed with ink. Which, not coincidentally, is roughly what used to be a fax machine has become, what was a typewriter is now, where the souls of videorecorders and telephones and cameras and walkie-talkies now live, what large parts of an aircraft cockpit are, what an oscilloscope or a heartbeat monitor or whatever is. Everything is a couple of chips and a plate of glass. (Oh, and radio waves. We'll get onto those, be sure of that.)
And this in its own way is part of the digitisation of human culture, the freeing of our information - which is to say, a large part of being human - from the need to evolve at the speed of making things. Instead, it - and thus to a large part we - now evolve at the speed of having ideas and writing them down. Look what happened last time we made that kind of leap. What a time to be alive.
And you say technology is dull? Jeez.
And this in its own way is part of the digitisation of human culture, the freeing of our information - which is to say, a large part of being human - from the need to evolve at the speed of making things. Instead, it - and thus to a large part we - now evolve at the speed of having ideas and writing them down. Look what happened last time we made that kind of leap. What a time to be alive.
And you say technology is dull? Jeez.
None of which is what this blog was going to be about when I started it - which was about how the Cold War (another of my obsessions) hasn't gone away but has embedded itself, like viral DNA, in the tiniest, most intimate details of our everyday life. That'll have to wait until next time.
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