Left Behind...

Left-field thinking. No one in their right mind would argue that ideas shot from the hip haven't always been the major driving force behind most of the technological advances made by the human race, from the Neolithic Era to the Industrial Revolution and right into the present day. In past posts I've referred to many such lightbulb moments - particularly in the various fields of 'computing' [italics deliberate]. But the one thing that people seldom notice are all the Betamax's that escaped commercial exploitation and success, denying the rest of us good, useful and even fun technology. I know, I've been there, with some good people with a lot of talent, and we couldn't break the veil to get heard.

Rather, the story has so often read that nascent great ideas and concepts are often missed by the suits and financiers in their pecuniary pursuit of wealth, often going with the 'obvious' or in latter years, riding the wave of some meme or bubble until their misplaced faith in a chimera implodes in their (or their investment clients) faces. More often than not, though, mediocre and safe ideas survive and thrive. Too often, great ideas - ideas that could genuinely be of benefit to wider society - are subsumed beneath layers of mundanity, never to surface. I mentioned the other day a guy who understands this well: Ted Nelson, who himself standing on the shoulders of visionaries, saw a proper post-linear-text future for information technology with his Xanadu project. He is eighty-four and to this day evangelising a methodology that still hasn't been taken up by wider society/commerce that would have revolutionised the documentation world decades ago, had the funders and enablers seen beyond Microsoft Word and flat page desktop publishing. 

 It's strange that Apple - in the 'wilderness years' without Steve Jobs, in the nineties - actually came up with some pretty off-the-wall implementations of technologies predicted by the likes of Ted Nelson et al, which were then summarily dumped in the Neo-Jobs era of Apple 'Product' which continues today. Now, I'm as committed an Apple Product consumer as the next [Apple Product consuming] person, but I think something went missing along the way. True innovation.

Apple was truly innovative in the earliest days and Jobs was the main artistic and commercial driver, with 'the other Steve' (Wozniak) and many others besides, the technical geniuses that made it all realisable and commercially feasible. But weirdly, some of the best ideas and concepts were dreamt up by the Apple techies during the company's commercial nadir, most of which are today unknown to most people.

Now, we simply consider and use all of the incredible technological firepower of/and our devices as mere white goods, using it all for the playing out of mundanities and trivia, while all the while they feed our data and metrics back to the corporations that sell us this stuff in order that they can more efficiently sell us even more of this stuff. Moore's Law is being stretched to its very quantum limits in the service of whatever crass meme happens to be current, just so we can watch/listen-to/game carefully curated commercial media in ever-increasing 'fidelity'. 

Our iPhones etc., should be objects of wonder, but we take all of it totally for granted, pausing mid-tweet only to bemoan poor signal/wi-fi/whatever. There was a time when people would say "Wow", now it's just "Meh" or whatever is the present moment's equivalent. I look forward to the next real moment of wonder: as I once said to a scientologist [blog post passim, I think]  - I was eighteen at the time - who asked me what my ambition was; my reply was 'to wake up tomorrow'. Nuff said: the wonder's all around me, not embedded in silicon. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place for a while too. A moment in a life.