Curatorialist

My first desk job after college was at The Walt Disney Company. Email was just being implemented company-wide, but there were  a few who preferred to write their “memos” by hand. My boss was one of those holdouts and I was tasked with transcribing her scribbles, printing them out, getting them signed by her and routing them, either by walking or through interoffice mail. Walking was the quicker of the two options. There was also a social phenomenon wherein having someone else type, edit and route your messages was a symbol of power and so for people like my boss, she resisted this new thing called Email, where she had to take personal responsibility for her own written messages. However, within months the entire company was up and running on email and she was forced to adapt. Not that many years later, the notion of handwriting a note to somebody seemed downright archaic. This kind of rapid growth of technology has always seemed mysterious to me, although I have been as much a part of it’s growth anybody. The rate of growth has seemed so fast as to be nearly out of control and certainly reading the news and trying to keep up with it is positively dizzying.

Ray Kurzweil has helped me understand how this all works. He’s obviously smart, you can tell within 9 seconds of hearing him talk. He goes right into the facts and possibilities of the exponential growth of information technology. The notion is complex and simple: we humanoids think linearly, but the growth of technology doesn’t move at the same pace as us, it pretty much doubles every time there’s a new advancement. It’s a great thought if you consider that it means we are actually closer to solutions than we think we are, at any given time. The energy crisis, our economic crisis…  although the complexity of the solution is, well, complex, the steps to accomplishing it are fewer than we might imagine.