November 23rd, 2011

I Love technology.  I’m amazed by it, I’m in Love with it and it’s the one thing that constantly fills me with optimism.  I grew up on science fiction and I grew up with a NASA Dad.  Though that means I grew up with the horrible conflict of knowing that reality could NEVER catch up with what I read about, but it ALSO meant I could go visit spacecraft (NOT starships!) and satellites lying in pieces in white work rooms and my Dad shot LASERS at the MOON and used liquid nitrogen and had email before anyone else did and ALSO had pneumatic tubes delivering things to his underground, pipe-laden, government-issue office.

Technology changes every day – both on a practical level (my thoughts on this are swirling around because I just installed a new preamp which didn’t exist a couple of months ago) and on a – I hesitate to use the word “theological”… but really, science and math on the far end of the spectrum really DOES verge on religion more than chemistry or physics – and on an almost THEOLOGICAL level (a recent theory about existence redefines the universe as nothing but a 3 dimensional representation of 2 dimensional data… the mind is nothing but an ever-collapsing quantum wave front… quantum physics and metaphysics get closer and closer together, and when some asks me if I believe in God, I’ll still happily respond “no, I believe in math”.

Today I read about a new metal that’s almost as light as air.  My phone runs a more advanced version of Photoshop than even existed a couple of years ago.  I downloaded a 3 hour video in only a couple of moments and as I type this, we’re driving at 65mph on a dark highway and in the background my machine is converting that video to an entirely different format which I plan to merge with the multi-track recorded audio… 8 gigabytes worth which Live on a flash card smaller than a postage stamp. 

I think mine is the last generation that will feel wonder about technology.  The people who are younger than me grew up in this endless hurtling stream of innovation and they EXPECT that wondrous turnover.  I’m in the last generation that grew up without email.  I grew up in the generation where truly “science fiction” became “science fact” on a daily basis.

It’s an amazing thing to behold.  I Love calling L.R. Baggs (the guys who built my preamp) and griping about this or that aspect and hashing out a fix with them.  I Love seeing the finished product and listening to why it looks the way it does and why it’s designed the way it is – and how the things this item does weren’t possible a couple of years ago.  Ha.  Just read about what google does on a daily basis!

And so, as I turn off the news and we tune into Christmas carols, I try to bury my head in the beauty of that headlong rush of innovation – as medical technology becomes more and more stagnant and its products become solely the option of the truly megarich, the rest of the tech world gets cheaper and cheaper so that a poverty-line musician can remain connected to the internet at all times, create his own CDs and webcast his weekly open mic to everyone in the world… or at least to as many people as care (generally about 200, and that’s plenty good enough).

It may or may not be the worst time to be alive, but I think it’s not.  America might be on the brink of self-destruction, but today I’m slightly optimistic.  The only thing that I’m worried about is that at the beginning of this entry I was thinking about how as long as we can make it through the next decade, in the next TWO decades all the assholes in power will likely be dead and hopefully we’ll slowly replace them with people who’ve learned from their mistakes…

But then I think about it and in the next two decades we could well be seeing our Life expectancy extended past a century… and those assholes in power are the people that will be able to afford it.  Oh wait… that’s science fiction.

This week.