The Glocal Citizen

Introduction to the Tech Tree October 8, 2006

Ok…. what’s the Tech Tree?
It’s like our family tree… every human being receives his material existence directly from two parents, and can trace the succession line all the way up to the first (or one of the first ones) human couple.

Let’s define technology as Kevin Kelly’s Technium:

“The Technium: It’s a word I’ve reluctantly coined to designate the greater sphere of technology – one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. In short, the Technium is anything that springs from the human mind. It includes hard technology, but much else of human creation as well.”

Every technology can be traced back to a human need or interest. It’s a more complex tree because one tech can have several parents, and there are different factors that have influence on its developement.

I like to think about the story of every human invention that sorrounds us, from a door-knob to an airplane. I like to mentally filter things to leave only those that we actually need… until I leave human being naked in front of the mystery of his own personal existence.

Inspired a little in my favorite game of all times, Sid Meier’s Civilization, I want to build an informatic, hyperlinked, graphical map of technology. In KK’s language: I want to draw the Technium’s map.

As I said before, the Tech Tree can’t be linear because of the multiple factors that have an effect on tech developement… it has to be a 4D Network… searchable through space and time…. through human minds that influence one each other… through different paradigms, and cosmologies of different times….

This is a pre-list of considerations for the TT model:

- The protagonist of the TT is a specific Technology.

- There will be a difference between BASE TECH or ESSENTIAL TECH (defining essence as the attribute -or set of attributes- that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is) and UPGRADE TECHS (techs that have the same purpose as their mother BASE TECH, and just do it better or add secondary attributes).

- Techs will be related with parent techs (those that made possible its existence), heir techs (those that exist thanks to it), and cousin techs (those closely related, but not sine qua non).

- Techs will be related also with thinkers, science, historical events.

- Techs will brake up into their components.