Technology, Compression and Life...

Being an engineer, and having been a metal-smith (which were one of the earliest adopters of technology and tools), I work with technology and tools a lot. Recently contemplating on the nature of stuff, it occurred to me that almost all of technology, almost all tools, are means of "compressing" some aspect of life - increasing their "density", or "value".

Tools "compress" effort, and allow you to do more work in a unit of time. The multiply or "compress" force to give mechanical advantage, or shear or otherwise push a lot of work into a small "thing".

Agriculture is about compressing the amount of food into an area of land. That couple handful of berries from a random wild bush is compressed a thousand fold in a modern farm, with bush after bush of plants bread for volume (some times at the expense of taste).

Transferring power "compresses energy" so that you can transport it - so that the spinning 100 ton rotor of a power plant can provide a tiny amount of its energy to spin up the motor on your house vac.

Information is all about compression. Taking vague concepts and reducing them symbolically into utterances we call words, which we break down and spell with letters, which we can encode with ones and zeros which we can further reduce by coding statistics (replacing a common word with a shorter code).

Even the media of the information continues to be compressed - to increase in density.  My first Hard Drive could store 5MB - 5 million characters of information. A typical typed page is about four thousand characters - so it could hold over a thousand pages of text! It was a monster weighing close to 50 lbs, and being physically larger than my computer.  Now days, you can buy a micro SD card, smaller than your thumb nail which has 64GB of data - more than 12,000 time the capacity, on something about 1/12,000 the size...

But at the same time, I think more and more people are realizing that "it" isn't just about the compression any more.  Instead of food per unit acre, people are realizing that there are other metrics - the taste of something grown and prepared with love and intention.  That instead of using a power sander which could do the job in a few moments, that using a piece of sand paper allows you to feel the thing you're working on - to have a relationship with it.  That even in the world of PDFs and download books, that there is a certain pleasure in touching the pages, of flipping them - of seeing the dog eared pages, and signs that someone else has appreciated this book - shared in it's pleasure.

Perhaps the Luddites were on to something after all...