Thank God I'm out of Touch

When you imagine the future, and that point in that future when our lives are kept entirely digital -- no photo albums, no CDs, no journals, no books, no planners, nothing of our personal lives at all in any physical form. All of that will become information, and in doing so it will be a new level of self-representation. I think that transition is conceptually a huge evolutionary jump; a huge abstract leap.

I would assume that most relatively intelligent people who are alive now can imagine that kind of future. We're at a time wheni t always seems like someting big like that is about to happen, and we are at the membrane itself. But, when I think about how it could come about realistically, I'm convinced that it will take an amazingly future-minded company, the kind of company that is mildly benevolent when part of the story of some of the movies I've seen that weren't good enough to remember the name of. They make all of the things possible that seem so mundane when shown in that way. It will be what cell phones are now, and what a 16-bit console seemed like to me as a kid.

But the more I think about it, I think about how I blog on Blogger, use Gmail for email, use Google Video all the time, was looking earlier about putting my programming projects up on Code.Google.Com (and if it was even possible to make an account), and the many, many other different things I was looking at. If there is any company that can really be that company, the linchpin to a new technological era for society... a neo-AOL, but with an exponentially greater impact on life, it is Google. And it would be great if it were.

They are the only people who seem like they can pull off being a mildly benevolent stilt for modern life. They're the only company that I can realistically see always staying on that track, never becoming a monolithic evil force, or being phased out by time, or ending in a flurry of illegal acts. And the best part of it all is, they do all of the things that they do very well. They actually know what they're doing. There are so many other companies trying to do the same kinds of things (maybe not the multitude that Google does, but even at specific things, like blogs), but there is a ridiculously small number of companies for a given app that it's something I'd be really proud of.

So maybe the emotional revolution really is coming in my lifetime...