The inconvenience of flight

There was an old book called "Small is beautiful". It was about living "as if people mattered" and using "appropriate technologies". To over simplify, it wanted real quality over greed. At the time (1973), computers and networks and social media was only available in primitive form to a very few, most people dialed their analogue phones and a color TV was still expensive.

Skip to now, big is still a big deal and small is seen as almost peasantry. Yet the most brilliant people are still small and dream big. While the promise of information leading to knowledge creation on ever present media, is still obstructed by laziness, easy answers, half truths, big money... somehow greed is much easier to finance to make big things rather than seek truth.

I have been using networked communications for nearly 30 years and computer programs for longer than that. What I was waiting for was some way to collaborate, enjoy, converse with those who want more than just scheduled predictability so we have time and energy to dream. You know, the things you so freely wanted to pursue as a kid but needed to wait until you had the resources of adults.

Yet when you finally got older, the world seems to tell us those childhood dreams won't work because the wisdom of yesterday, tried and tested methods were always better. This is true if the goal of each moment of our lives never changed. But as the Seasons change, the weather surprises us and we feel differently throughout our lives, instead of embracing the beauty of each precious moment of our short existence here, we want to suppress it and live safely, orderly and to be average. Even the rich want to be average, to fit in, to belong by being the same.

So when the most incredible growth seems to be in billions using the Internet, so much focus is on the crowd usage for the average on the Bell curve. Using the Internet on devices has allowed some small companies to become a giant (dinosaurs) in a few years among the littered corpses of millions of failed attempts and disappointed people (birds). It is a fact of life that most fail and only a few can get the gold medal, if that were the only definition of success.

This blog is about how small birds (the descendants of giants called dinosaurs) can survive and thrive among the land of giants that will be around for a while but are finding it harder and harder to survive among limited resources. While size (big or small) is neither good nor bad, ugly nor beautiful, my view is that the age of mass production for growth is over. We still need things that have to be made in the billions but they provide less and less margin to satisfy the lives of those who work in the assembly lines that produce them. 

Out of habit, education or worship of past success, most of society is still structured like an assembly line where the decision of a few affects multiples or exponents of thousands. So a tiny "brain" of a few needs to control a massive "body" of people who follow, therefore most organisations are or strive to be giants like dinosaurs.

I want to be a bird. If our efforts grow, I want to be a flock of birds flying in V formation. It's an ingenious trick on aerodynamics that even fighter jets mimic to reduce drag and increase efficiency. I don't like to be obvious or conveniently large. Instead the agility, freedom, speed and vision of birds flying in formation will become the new normal for growth in people and finance. More important, big inefficient things survive much worse in hard times which have always been a constant in our beautiful planet.

What I've written seems serious and complicated but what can be more simple than the story of dinosaurs that only exist as fossils, FX films and our speculation. The giant forms of the species all died off during a time of darkness and low food production on earth. Yet the small flying feathered animals we call birds is most probably their descendants.

So why not imitate nature and strive for the fittest form of the longest surviving species on earth: a formation of birds rather than the massive beasts of thousands. Big is much more convenient because size always appears impressive and therefore convenient to display success. Money, fame and status seems to follow the big things and popular people. The inconvenience of flight is much more enjoyable and can finally make a living for all who venture to change from the common wisdom of "big is better" to "small is fitter".