I have to admit that the February Chuck Klosterman column in Esquire was lame, but he has made up for it with an entertaining look at technology in the March issus. He makes this astute observation:
In retrospect, the wheel was an obvious solution to a problem everyone was aware of-yet it still took thousands of years. Text messaging is precisely the opposite: It’s the solution to a desire I never even knew I had, and it came into existence long before anyone was demanding it.
I didn’t send a single text message until the summer of 2005, and when I did, it was almost certainly because I was drunk. To my surprise, I discovered that I loved texting. Very often, I (apparently) want tot tell people information that is so inane and trivial that I does not even justify making a phone call. Here are five of my most recent text messages:“I am eating walleye.”
“That was some quality ivory tickling!”
“Hide the steak knives.”
“I am shopping for a robot.”
“Ian Mortimer!”
He goes on to list some other Antiwheel technology:
An even better example of successful Antiwheel Technology is TiVo. Prior to getting a DVR from my cable company, I don’t think I ever thought, Man, I sure wish I could freeze live television. Before I had that box, using a VCR to tape programming did not seem remotely troubling. And unlike TiVo, the VCR was an invention people were actively awaiting.
We’ve always assumed that necessity is the mother of invention, but what happens when necessity no longer exists? Society has evolved beyond the stage of building a better mousetrap; metaphorically we now have mousetraps that can kill water buffalo. It’s becoming harder and harder to think of new everyday things that we want or need, and that creates a completely new paradigm for inventors. It makes the process of inventions less practical and more abstract: We now have to come up with the solutions to problems that don’t exist.
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