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In Terry Pratchett’s “Truckers,” a group of tiny nomes is on a quest to find home. The problem is, home is a mystery. They arrive at a department store and discover a whole nation of their kind who call the store home. They’ve even spun together a department-based society, complete with nomish religion. They have holy scriptures, an origin story, and don’t believe in life beyond the store.
All around them, we humans are oblivious to their existence. To nomish eyes, we are lumbering, oafish creatures that speak slowly, in deep, booming voices 
. Also, nomes don’t live as long as we do. From their perspective, we appear to live nearly forever, but, in reality, the differences come out in the wash. Their different perception of time means that the length of a lifetime feels about the same.
There’s another cool element of the story, and it’s the reason for this post. The protagonist, Masklin, is in possession of a little, magical black box called “The Thing.” It talks to him, guides him, and helps him as he carries out its cryptic instructions.
Spoiler Alert
It’s only a minor spoiler, but skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know any more about the story. The thing is some kind of computer. Masklin’s adventures center around the reclamation of a nome society that has lost the knowledge that led to the thing‘s creation. It’s only called the thing because nomes now lack the terminology and historical awareness to properly describe it.
I thought about all of this after reading The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge over at TechCrunch. If you’ve been reading for a while, you know that I regurgitate stuff like this with something approaching regularity.
The fact that virtually all of the world’s knowledge is only a few taps away is truly mind-blowing. No matter who indexes it, who serves it, who edits it — the knowledge is there, and the knowledge is with you, always. This is one of the most important developments in history, and its repercussions can’t be underestimated. But to consider it an unmixed good would be premature and naive.
…
The problem lies with the trend. We’re looking up more things, more often, and not because we’re more curious. It’s because we can’t be bothered to retain even the data that matter to us. The GPS in cars is an advance party of this trend: every couple months we hear of some driver who has followed the GPS to the bottom of a lake, or used a highway as a walking path because it was labeled as such on their phone’s map. My dad, who has driven to visit my brother in Vancouver, B.C., a dozen times, still uses the GPS despite my brother living in the same neighborhood for several years now. When I went up with him a month ago, the GPS route was slightly different, and my dad nearly had a panic attack. I convinced him to take the correct exit, but he was this close to doing something he knew was wrong simply because the map indicated he should. (Coldewey)
This plays into my daydreams about a future where humanity, divorced from its high-tech playthings , regards modern day artifacts with awe. We’d cradle our hard drives and protect our cellular towers. We’d know they’re important, but we’d lack the means to grasp why. A ton of knowledge would degrade slowly on sealed, inscrutable, magnetic platters. A few hard drives would make it through this dark era, waiting for generations to pass.
Then, one day, the appropriate post-IT geek would take on the task of figuring it out. A few generations later, after a ton of failure, a descendant of that geek would discover how to piece together some fragments. But, by then, most of it will be gone.
That’s nothing but a little thought exercise driven by the perception that much of our daily routine involves a bunch of black boxes. We can use them well enough, but we have no understanding of how they are constructed. Of course, lots of technologies have this problem, but the level of specialization required for computers makes this a bit different than strictly mechanical stuff. Computers may as well be run by magical elves generating power on stationary bikes.
I’m no luddite; I’m hooked up to the internet via feeding-tube. This stuff is important, amazing, creative, and complex, but sometimes it feels rather tenuous. Here’s hoping that our distant progeny don’t roam the earth with a bunch of hyper-intelligent cubes. We’ll be annoying the things with constant worship while they, once again, try to get that “fire” technology to stick.
