Douglas Adams - 3 Rules that Describe Our Reactions to Technologies
Chris Dixon unearthed a great quote from Douglas Adams on the nature of technological adoption that unsurprisingly hits the mark in our ever changing and evolving world:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things
Some that come to mind: horse to car, index card to online search, PC to mobile, web to app, portal to messaging, Newton to Einstein, oil to electric, rock to rap, Aquinas to Bacon, buying to renting, files to streaming, network TV to cordkilling, broadcast to social, programming CPUs to programming biology, server to cloud, vm to container, wired to wireless, long read to TLDR, privacy to public to ephemeral, paper based news aggregation to digital aggregation, checks to online banking, gold to fiat to bitcoin, linear to exponential growth, large to small teams, to a world that ignores you to a world the responds to you, nation states to who knows what, a military of people to a Military of Things, and weekly versus binge watching. Any others?
