I used to have an illustrated postcard depicting an heroic, Rand-esque male character standing proudly against the wind, chest thrust outward, shirtsleeves rolled above the elbow, exposing muscular forearms, stacks of blueprints tucked messily under each arm, his fist clenching a quiver of pens. He glares purposefully into the distance against the backdrop of some mighty feat of engineering or public works project, gears and sunbeams radiating outward from just over the horizon. This kind of Howard Roark hero figure has been a staple theme in western culture ever since the Industrial Revolution ushered in the Age Of Big, an age when innovation meant growth and monumental challenges were met by monumental men with monumental ideas doing monumental things. People thought big and did big things.
Today, the illustrator might draw a rather different-looking figure. Instead of pens, our hero holds a mobile device, which he uses to manage his empire, creating, making plans, scheduling appointments, and syncing important documents to his laptop back at the office. If we were to crack open this device and look inside we would find thousands and thousands of little components, each fulfilling its own unique and vital role in the operation of the device and each with it’s own unique story about the journey it took to become a part of this device. Also behind each of these tiny, seemingly insignificant pieces, is a story of a person or group of people who dedicated their careers to perfecting the science and design behind that one, tiny part. These are people who don’t drive a truck to a job site or oversee a foundation being poured or attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony, but who sit in rooms and make calculations and experiment with materials and processes in the hopes of achieving even smaller and more efficient technologies that will eventually become parts of devices that will help all of us live and work better. These are the new builders of the future, leading us forward to a smaller, more intricate and complex world where evolution no longer favors the biggest and the strongest, but the smallest and the fastest. These are the new masters of the universe. The Titans Of Tiny.
In the movie “1941” Slim Pickens’ character is captured by a Japanese submarine crew along with personal items taken from his pickup truck, including a large tabletop radio. As one of the Japanese crew members tries to force the oversize radio down through the submarine hatch he observes “we’ve got to figure out a way to make these things smaller.”
And indeed we have. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made his famed prediction, popularly known as Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years. For more than forty years now Moore’s Law has held up and is expected to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. This, of course, means that a radio that once was too big to fit through a door now fits easily in your pocket, and it performs better as well.
Consider for a moment the endless hours of research and experimentation and design and production and distribution than go into creating something like an iPhone and getting it into your hands at a palatable price. It’s really quite an amazing thing. So much effort, so many moving parts, so much design, so much attention to every miniscule detail, from the way it functions and how fast to the shape and even the shade of color. Then it arrives and we unwrap it and begin the process of getting to know it, playing and experimenting and testing various functions … always with one eye out for the slightest imperfection to jump on and criticize. We take technology for granted, failing to fully appreciate the level of human achievement that these devices represent. These things, after all, are luxury items. We are so far past the basics of survival that we have the luxury of being uber-critical of our toys. Take that point as you like.
Perhaps no one has summed up our dysfunctional relationship with new technology better than Louis CK:
“They made us sit there, on the runway, for forty minutes, we had to sit there. Oh really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air, incredibly… like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero? You’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going ‘Oh my god! Wow!’ You’re sitting in a chair … in the sky!” (Google “Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy”)
I was recently in a discussion on Facebook with someone who was arguing against the iPad, claiming that a digital book doesn’t have that same weight and feel as an “actual” book, nor does it have that “book smell”. I actually hear that a lot, that the iPad doesn’t “feel” quite the same. To them I ask “so what?” What is the inherent benefit of the current book feel over this new book feel? Nothing. The fear of change and the new sends many people scurrying back to what is comfortable and known. It’s easier for some to find fault with new technologies and use that as an excuse to avoid having to learn a new way of doing things.
But everything we use was at some point new to us. When you were born everything was a new technology, including your own body, and you didn't know anything about any of it. But you learned. And just like your own body, the technology on the shelves today represents the pinnacle of human evolution. Despite all of your flaws, you are the best that humans have ever been. The same goes for technology. What you are seeing on shelves right now is the best it has ever been. The electronic device you hold in your hand is the result of a process of evolution that has been taking place for a very long time, and the result is a product that is a tiny testament to the power of the human mind.
Our culture celebrates the big and the grand; great buildings, massive dams, sprawling cities and gargantuan vehicles. It’s easy to look at these and immediately grasp the grandness of them, precisely because they are so large and in your face. The scale of them forces us to take notice and feel a sense of awe. But some of the greatest monuments to human achievement can't even be seen with the naked eye. Some of man’s best work goes unseen and unsung, locked inside a colorful case in the bottom of your bag. These mini monuments to man’s quest to be better and to evolve are all around us, making our lives better and more interesting. These devices entertain us, help us work, manage our lives, communicate and assist us in so many ways. Technology frees us up to do more, see more and envision things that we otherwise would never have considered possible. We have tools available to us unlike any other time in human history. Because of these technologies we are able to give life to new ideas and create things we never dreamed possible.
We now have the tools at our fingertips to achieve great things because someone else had the courage to think small.
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