reflections on the technium

Hi, I’m Chuck Petras, and you can learn more about me here.

Why Technium?

Kevin Kelly coined the term technium to describe the greater sphere of technology in reference to the interaction and interplay that exists across all realms (including culture, ethics, social systems, law, art, communication, language, ritual, soul, and consciousness) of humanity. Technium is essentially anything that comes from the human mind making the core concept of the technium vast and expansive. More specifically, the technium as the intersection between all possible technologies is the matrix in which humanity ultimately defines itself and determines the future.

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” — Sir Winston Churchill

“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” — William Pollard

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” — Alan Kay

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky

“He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils: for time is the greatest innovator.” — John Jewkes

“There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” — Albert Einstein

“Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and experience again. They select, combine and test, seeking to find order in their experiences: ‘Which is the mostest? Which is the leastest?’ They smell, taste, bite and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub and try to pull things apart.” — R. Buckminster Fuller

Innovation “must be organized for the systematic abandonment of…the customary…the comfortable.” — Peter Drucker

“Another danger is that commercial pressures of one sort or another will divert the attention of the best thinkers from real innovation to exploitation of the current fad, from prospecting to mining a known lode. These pressures manifest themselves not only in the disappearance of faculty into industry, but also in the conservatism that overtakes those with well-paying investments–intellectual or financial–in a given idea. Perhaps this effect explains why so few interesting software systems have come from the large computer companies; they are locked into the existing world.” — Dennis Ritchie

“No Technology Religion.” — ????

“Their judgment was based more on wishful thinking than on a sound calculation of probabilities; for the usual thing among men is that when they want something they will, without any reflection, leave that to hope, while they will employ the full force of reason in rejecting what they find unpalatable.” — Thucydides, in History of the Peloponnesian War

Chinese curses…

• May you live in interesting times
• May you come to the attention of those in authority
• May you find what you are looking for