For a long time hand axes, AKA bifaces, were used to butcher animals, cut wood, dig, drill holes and make fire. The flakes produced when fashioning and reworking flint axes would have been used for more precise cutting. And some hand axes show no signs of wear, which suggests they were used for ritual purposes. While stone age people certainly used wood tools that have not survived in the archeological record, they must have depended on having an axe close at hand for survival.
We are entering a new era of multipurpose tool. No, I’m not talking about the swiss army knife with two blades, two screwdrivers, an awl, a corkscrew, scissors, tweezers, a spoon and a fork. I’m talking about the thing about half of you are using to read these words: your phone.
Just today I used my phone as an alarm clock, to send messages across the globe, to read the (somewhat depressing) news, to arrange for a ride to the airport, to pay for that ride, to board a plane, to check the time (repeatedly), get directions, listen to an audio program, tell me where I was when I got lost, walk into Costco and give my laptop internet for me to write this post. Who knows? I might even decide to make a call with it later on.
These days we have many specialized tools to keep us safe from nature and control our surroundings. On the plane today I even pulled down a little shelf on the seatback in front of me that held my phone for watching a movie. (I didn’t end up doing that because I fell asleep instead.) If I needed to cut wood, I have a dozen options in my garage. (Isaac and I used a grilled cheese powered chain saw to take the limbs off the dead tree in our backyard.) The tool I carry every day doesn’t manipulate material objects, but manipulates information.
Oh. To add to the list, I also took this picture:
In my FOSDEM talk, I called the World Wide Web the “mesolithic era of the internet”. If so, the mobile phone is the neolithic and I can’t imagine this era will end until we have our phones surgically embedded in our bodies or something.