How many motors do you have in your house?

Kevin Kelly, in What Technology Wants and on his blog, talks about how the most successful technologies disappear. They start as major innovations, then become increasingly invisible and ubiquitous. (Douglas Adams pointed this out, too--Kelly quotes him at the link.)

Buckminster Fuller called it "ephermeralization," doing "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing." (Note that he says can, not must or should. I don't think he, or Kelly, or Diamandis or any of the Techno-Evangelists actually advocates for banning old technologies. There are still people producing illuminated manuscripts, buggy whips, and flint arrowheads.)

Kelly cites electric motors as one example of massive ephemeralization. When they were new, electric motors were huge and expensive. Entire factories were adapted to run off a single large motor. As they got smaller and cheaper, they were adapted to a million uses that weren't originally anticipated. They became ubiquitous and invisible.

How many do you have around you? Think about everything you own where you push a button and something moves. There's a motor in there.

( It's a longish list. )

This wanted to be one of those posts where I complain about my job, but the problem isn't my job, it's my brain. I'm losing my ability to act like the kind of person who can do the kind of job I have.

It's not a rant-post obliquely glorifying my unique brilliance compared to the dull plodding minds of my coworkers. Nor, conversely, is it a guilt-post, confessing my secret fear that I'm not smart enough and I Will Be Found Out. Everybody's a Special Snowflake and everybody's flawed.

What it is, I think, is the beginning of an inquiry into either a developing neurological disorder or a basic thinking style which I can no longer cover up. I'm not sure which.

( I don't have nearly enough information yet. )

I've spent part of my four-day weekend at Sock Summit 2011. It's a convention for people who knit socks.

I'm not a sock knitter (or wearer, for that matter), and am only a marginal knitter, and I live just up the street from the Oregon Convention Center, so my participation was pretty casual, and I can't give much in the way of insider rapture.

But as a general craftswoman I can say that Sock Summit is a very impressive thing. I took a specialized class ("Cast On Cornucopia") on Thursday, and today I had a chance to wander around the vendor market; both experiences confirmed that creativity is absolutely going off the charts.

People are putting new materials to ancient uses (carbon fiber knitting needles! Plastic drop spindles printed on 3D printers!), and pushing out the boundaries of labor-intensive manual processes like hand-painting fleeces. You can knit with a range of fibers unimagined by the average American knitter thirty years ago (bamboo! hemp! yak!). You can accurately replicate socks worn by 12th century peasants in Norway, and socks worn by rich gentleman-golfers in 1890, and silk stockings from a Constantinople lady's wardrobe in 1500.

And here's the thing: there's not a craft or hobby being practiced today that isn't experiencing the same kind of explosion of creativity, digging into the past, borrowing from the future, leveraging technology, and spreading ideas across the world.

So although I managed to escape the show floor with only one purchase, a handmade wooden tabletop swift of truly elegant simplicity and functionality, I came away absolutely loving life in the 21st century, and glad to be alive in such an exciting time.