Thesis 26

Something with the properties we see in everyware was foreordained the moment tools and services began to be expressed digitally.

Long before there was an everyware, we simply had tools. Some of them were mechanical in nature, like timepieces and cameras. Others were electric, or electronic, in whole or in part: radios, telephones, televisions. Others still were larger, less mobile, designed to perform a single function: appliances. And together, they comprised a technics of everyday life.

It was, of course, an analog universe. Where these tools gathered information about the world, it was encoded as the state of a continuously variable physical system: so many turns of a toothed wheel, an etched groove of such-and-such depth. And this had its advantages: to this day, there are those who swear by the tone and richness of analog recordings or the images produced by the fall of light on film grain.

In time, though, many of the tools that had been electric, mechanical, or some combination of the two were recast as digital, which is to say that when they encoded information about the world, it was rendered as a discrete, stepped progression of ones and zeroes. This afforded perfect fidelity in reproduction, more efficient transmission, all but cost-free replication. And so the analog Walkman gave way to the digital iPod, the Motorola MicroTAC begat the RAZR, the original Canon Elph becamewhat else?the Digital Elph.

None of the analog devices could have communicated with each otherthey barely even related to one another. What, after all, does a song on cassette have to do with an image burned into film? you could rub them against each other all day and not get anything for your trouble but scratched celluloid, tangled up in ribbons of magnetic tape. What could you have done with either over a telephone, except tell the person on the other end of the line all about the neat songs and pretty pictures?

All of the digital devices can and do communicate with each other, routinely and trivially. you can take a picture with your camera, send it from your phone, store it on your iPod. In just a few brief years, we've come to regard transactions like this as thoroughly unremarkable, but they're marvelous, reallyalmost miraculous. And they owe everything to the fact that all of the devices involved share the common language of on and off, yes or no, one and zero.

We too often forget this. And although I would prefer to resist determinism in any of its forms, above all the technological, it's hard to argue with in this instance. It's not simply that, as my former employers at Razorfish used to say, "Everything that can be digital, will be"; it's that everything digital can by its very nature be yoked together, and will be.

This is the logic of "convergence." Everything connects.