A friend of mine once told me as we were taking our first shaky steps into adulthood "it doesn't matter how much money you make, you always spend it all and need more." I'm reminded of this reading Flemming's recent post at Future Hi: Where's our leisure society?
Flemming ponders the reasons why we haven't realized the world of plenty that all of our technical progress surely should have provided by now.
The reason that didn't happen might be in the same category as why a brand new 3GHz PC isn't any faster than a 4.77MHz IBM PC from 20 years ago. In principle it should be a thousand times faster, and it is, technically speaking. But it doesn't do anything more. It takes longer to start up Word on it than to start WordStar on that ancient relic. And there are many more things that can go wrong, and more one needs to learn in order to use it.
He hints at a system that could get us on the right track, and of course it involves free flow of information. I picture it also in the context of an interactive global belief system aggregrator, something I'd love to work on if I weren't stuck in Flemmings self-reinforcing loops diagram :)
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