Technical Maturity
Figure 1: "All the doors in this spacecraft have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again, with the knowledge of a job well done. Hateful, isn't it?" – Marvin
According to Douglas Adams
"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works."
I'll re-phrase this.
"Anything in the world when you're born is normal and arbitrary, which is just the natural way the world works."
Wittgenstein said "the world is whatever is the case" and I wonder if Douglas Adams had that thought? A constructionist account of a tabula rasa mind demands its initial innocence toward all things.
"Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary, and you can probably get a career in it."
Excitement is a state some of us exist in our entire lives. So I think the humour is Douglas shining a light on normative neurodevelopment, of suddenly thinking you know how the world works at fifteen, and growing suspicious of it naturally at thirty-five as your confidence and energy wane.
Managing a sense of revolutionary excitement is part of the challenge that technology presents us, and some of us handle it better than others.
The question is, if you feel a sense of excitement about technology and creation, which are closely connected, what do you do with it? As a four and a half year old I had already made my career plans and was mulling a draft CV for the Space Rangers Corps, albeit prematurely. As a young adult scientist or engineer you do your best to bring dreams into being. As an artist you revel in your time, with all the creative tools and scope for speech you are given.
"Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
Maturity, and any wisdom that's forthcoming if we're lucky, shows that everything is both with and against the "natural order of things".
Sometimes the natural order of things really sucks (Hobbes) and we should create new things to improve it (Heidegger), whereas sometimes the things we create really suck (Goethe) and the order of things needs to be redeemed (Milton).
Moreover, are we not entirely part of the natural order of things? Isn't everything we do and invent just a continuation of the "natural order of things", when, as Alan Watts put it, "the rocks come alive". There is no "uncreated" thing, and we ourselves are created (in the creator's image) as creators.
If we are jaded by technical maturity, something more than a desire for the simplicity of youth is going on. The technologically mature position is the understanding that what is in the world is not actually arbitrary, but as David Graeber put it, "something we make and can just as easily make differently". Our world was given to us by our ancestors and we will hand it to our children. We see our part in it and rise to the challenge or walk away.
Not everyone reaches technical maturity. Some of us get stuck in the wide-eyed stage of life, forever giddy at the new. Others are lost even earlier, in the eternal warm thrill of confusion. How comfortable we feel with new technology depends on how closely the unfolding world meets or deviates from our hopes and expectations.
Technical maturity brings some pain. Knowing that most of what seemed possible will never happen in our actual lifetime. But we can also be thankful of the same, because a world with teleports, faster-than-light travel, laser swords and mind-probes might not actually be a wondrous place. Indeed, those who anticipate technology almost seem to have a better understanding than those who live in the epoch of its actual existence.
Maturity brings a deeper understanding of human beings; we see that "nobody really wants flying cars and they just wouldn't work out on a busy Saturday night down town anyway", and we accept that "spammers will spam, trolls will troll, haters will hate, and people will generally abuse communications technology to spy on each other and send dick pics. Not to save the world". Sometimes this knowledge weighs heavy on the tired dreamer.
All said, Adams' taxonomy is a great truth to navigate feelings about life, ageing and technology. It is also a sign-post to a deeper philosophy behind the humour.
Alongside other automatic door neuroses he shares with P.K Dick, one of Adams' observations, even more vibrant than "Do Androids Dream…" (Bladerunner), is the utter trashiness of the future.
We can build interplanetary communications systems to hold all of human knowledge, yet we allow corporate vandals to turn them into gaudy, plastic advertising spaces and say who may speak to whom. We can create automatic doors for our convenience, but we let them become irritating petulant gatekeepers with their own ideas about our needs and safety.
As for the society of grumpy old men angry at not getting their flying cars and convinced of conspiracy afoot, I've finally accepted that I'll never be a Space Ranger. Have you?
In a sense, seeing the banality of sad BigTech corporations full of greed, tripe and trumpery churn out deformed technological frippery - seeing them spread harms and bring out the worst in people - is a confirmation that despite our dreams technology cannot escape the natural order of things (Kierkegaard). For the habitually excited, that is our disappointment. Our heckles are not raised by new technology but the insult it offers to our moment of possibility.
This is simply what happens when you buy your tech from "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came".