Has anyone noticed that the smaller these computational and communications artefacts become, the more rapidly this whole planetary technological juggernaut accelerates?
There’s something of an uncertainty principle here – the more precisely we can measure, define and inhabit the various technological transmission media, the less certain we become about the velocity (and direction or destination) we might expect to experience as a consequence of them.
The corollary as natural inheritance of all this technical, technological acceleration is the procedural abbreviation of the scope of our cultural memory as a forgetting – both of the past and of our existence through (and dependence on) such an uncertain yet exponential curve of accelerating metamorphosis.
Phantom limb syndrome is a little similar – something has been necessarily lost or collectively forgotten but the cultural, psychological and emotional affect of all these older systems remain with us, encoded in and as a language and symbolic referential system of communication through which they are now rendered largely unintelligible or functionally useless and that is in this way simultaneously writing and unwriting its own history.
Something really does seem to be lost here and these indefinitely-extensible technologies of communication and computation are as dependent upon this psychological and cultural erasure as we all now are upon the synchronous uncertainty and opportunity it also encodes.
Daedelus Kite 