Bernie Michalik's posterous site

In reading Kevin Kelly's 'What Technology Wants' now, I started thinking
about what specifically IT wants. It has more specific wants than
technology in general.

Specifically I came up with at least five things that IT wants.

IT wants to Accumulate - IT wants to accumulate information. It wants to
process information, store information, and create more information. It
will continue to do this until it becomes a problem both to you and the IT,
which leads to the next thing that IT wants.

IT wants to Organize - The next thing IT wants is to organize information.
IT does better if it is able to do that. Organization information allows IT
to thrive. Disorganization is the death of IT.

IT wants to Accelerate - IT wants to accelerate for two reasons. One, as it
organizes, it can do this at a faster rate, and hence it accelerates.
However, IT itself is accelerating and getting faster and getting smaller,
and that also helps it accelerate.

IT wants to be Free - IT wants to be free in both senses of the word. It
wants to be cheaper and cheaper until it is free. But it also wants the
freedom to do what it wants. People want to lock down IT and make it (and
them) secure, but IT keeps coming up with ways to break free of that.

IT wants to Offset Analog - another thing IT wants is to offset (or
obliterate) its analog equivalent or facsimile. It does that by being
cheaper and faster and freer than analog until people give up analog and go
with the digital version that IT provides.

If you use IT in any area of your life, you will see it act like this. You
will start using IT, and suddenly you will find the IT is accumulating
information on your (or its) behalf: you will have more music, more things
to read, more movies to watch, more games to play. It will give you ways to
organize that information. You may find you are doing things faster:
watching more, listening to more, thinking more about what the IT provides.
If you use the IT for some time, you will find it getting cheaper: the
music costs less, the writing costs less. Eventually you find you no longer
use your old analog music, DVDs, analog clocks. If you do use them, it will
be for specialized or sentimental reasons.