10,000 yr old technologies revisited

I haven’t been well.

I’ve been lapsing in and out of lucidity and (more often than not) drifting off with the sound of the Oekonux Conference because I’m a maveric etc, and somewhere someone said “They’re all 200 year old technologies”. I think it may have been Smári McCarthy.

Yeahknow (I thought). I’m sure that this wasn’t what he meant, but something that appears to be happening in this explosion of crowd-sourced innovation is that EVERY (almost) forgotten technology is being pulled out of the attic and given a dust-off. And for some reason, I find this really interesting.

Anyway: 3D Pottery printing:

from : via

Which I love, because we were making pots at least 10,000 years ago. We invented pots before we invented the wheel… and there’s not a lot of technologies you can say that for… ignoring the plethora of sharpened sticks and rocks. Mind you, some of those were works of art in their own right as well, and as far as I’m aware, an obsidian scalpel is still a lot sharper than a steel one.

For some reason the 3D printed pot thing reminds me of the Bible-Writing-Robot thing. It’s almost an affirmation of something. Not sure what, but it feels good. I think pottery was one of the fundamentally civilising technologies. It’s like going home.