Humanity has been inventing toward delight for a long time. Johnson began with
a slide of shell beads found in Morocco that indicate human interest in
personal adornment going back 80,000 years. He showed 50,000-year-old bone
flutes found in modern Slovenia that were tuned to musical intervals we would
still recognize. Beads and flutes had nothing to do with survival. They were
art, conforming to Brian Eno’s definition: “Art is everything you don’t have to
do.” It looks frivolous, but Johnson proposed that the pursuit of delight is
one of the prime movers of history — of globalization, innovation, and
democratization.
Consider spices, a seemingly trivial ornament to food. In the Babylon of 1700
BCE — 3,700 years ago — there were cloves that came all the way from Indonesia,
5,000 miles away. Importing eastern spices become so essential that eventually
the trade routes defined the map of Islam. Another story from Islamic history:
when Baghdad was at its height as one of the world’s most cultured cities
around 800 CE, its “House of Wisdom” produced a remarkable text titled “The
Book of Ingenious Devices.” In it were beautiful schematic drawings of machines
years ahead of anything in Europe — clocks, hydraulic instruments, even a
water-powered organ with swappable pin-cylinders that was effectively
programmable. Everything in the book was neither tool nor weapon: they were all
toys.
Consider what happened when cotton arrived in London from India in the late
1600s. Besides being more comfortable than itchy British wool, cotton fabric
(called calico) could easily be dyed and patterned, and the democratization of
fashion took off, along with a massive global trade in cotton and cotton goods.
Soon there was an annual new look to keep up with. And steam-powered looms
drove the Industrial Revolution, including the original invention of
programmable machinery for Jacquard looms.
Consider the role of public spaces designed for leisure — taverns, coffee
shops, parks. Political movements from the American Revolution (Boston’s Green
Dragon Tavern) to Gay Rights (Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles) were fomented in
bars. Whole genres of business and finance came out of the coffee shops of
London. And once “Nature” was invented by Romantics in the late 1800s,
nature-like parks in cities brought delight to urban life, and wilderness
became something to protect.
Play invites us to invent freely.
—Stewart Brand s...@longnow.org <mailto:s...@longnow.org>
A linkable, illustrated version of this summary is on Medium
<https://medium.com/@stewartbrand/inventing-toward-delight-d42d1173e6de#.nfcz2stds>
The next SALT talk
<http://longnow.org/seminars/02017/feb/01/fixing-government-bottom-and-outside/>
is Jennifer Pahlka, “Fixing Government: Bottom Up and Outside In,” Wednesday,
Feb. 1._______________________________________________
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