I will be honest, my trip to Silicon Valley did not go entirely as expected.
I had thought (perhaps rather naively) that I would be thrown into a cauldron of red hot tech enterprise, with the heat of innovation and creativity scorching my very eyebrows. Metaphorically, of course.
I had assumed that, living in the shadow of the Mountain – Mountain View, home of Google – everyone would be in some sort of technological nirvana, with new and hitherto unheard of gadgets seamlessly integrated into the very fabric of their lives; or at least, into the fabric of their garments. I would be gaining a privileged glimpse into the future.
Instead, everything and everyone was surprisingly – dare I say, disappointingly? – normal. By and large, people were not obsessing over the imminent rise of AI or the deployment of killer dogbots any more than they were back home. And my own area of particular interest – the migration of knowledge from books to the internet – scarcely got a mention. Or maybe I wasn’t looking under the right rocks.
Only the ubiquity of corporate tech giants gave the game away. The football game was played at PayPal Park. The Lick Observatory was indebted to support from Google. Firefox proclaimed its goodness on a monument in downtown San Francisco.
Firefox monument in downtown San Francisco
This relative normality only served to create a heightened sense of disconnect between the frankly scarcely believable scale, complexity and otherness of new tech and the fact that it has all been created, here, by the cumulative efforts of countless human beings using nothing more than digital 1s and 0s.
This is a dissonance that our brains strongly dislike. We are being invited to believe something that appears unbelievable. It is a feeling, a physical, visceral reaction, intuited rather than rationalised.
Or, as Arthur C. Clarke’s third law states: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Which is surely the technological equivalent to Clement Greenberg’s famous dictum: that all profoundly original art looks ugly at first.
…
I have decided to number these blog posts, as it seemed appropriately tech-y. I doubt I’ll get to 100, but the leading zeroes look nice.
