How do you know if something is still just technology -- as opposed to
stuff that just works?
Well, according to the astonishingly bright, though regrettably deceased, DNA1, the presence of a manual is a strong clue. If a thing comes with a manual, then it's probably technology and may or may not actually do what you want it to do.
I recently bought a Brush Cutting machine -- a sort of industrial-strength version of a weed-eater. Or strimmer. Or whatever the hell you call it in whatever backwoods you inhabit. The thing is that the little ones fall apart at the mere sight of the sorts of grasses that tend to populate -- I might say "infest" -- smallholdings. Grasses thicker than your thumb, and head high... I digress. The machine is a splendid thing. With a metal blade fitted to its whirling end it can cut down small trees and could even serve as a pretty fearsome weapon of war if need be. It came with a manual. Not a hell of a thick manual, admittedly, but nevertheless, a Book.
So, while I sort of agree with DNA that this is a strong hint that the thing is leaning toward being technology, I think we can refine the notion a bit. For a start, I think we can hypothesise that the thicker the book, the stronger the hint. My mother recently bought a new Mercedes. One of those cars with computer screens that tell you when you're about to ding another car in the parking lot or when a tyre has gone flat (i.e. too late) or that utterly fail to warn you that you're about to drive off the end of the unbuilt section of elevated freeway because the thing's data was loaded from the original planning diagrams and not the reality of the bits that never got constructed because the project ran out of money. The Merc came with an instruction manual slightly thicker than the complete collection of DNA's slightly mischaracterised but terribly famous trilogy.
And there's a potential weakness in the hypothesis if we take the notion of what constitutes a book too literally. My newest computer -- unarguable a technology and hardly useful for anything except raising my blood pressure to dangerously unhealthy levels by reading the blatherings of self-entitled narcissistic know-nothings on various social media websites -- the current President of the USA, for example... my newest computer came without any book at all, which should, theoretically, qualify it as "useful stuff" and not at all a technology. The thing is that there is a book for it. A whole lot of books, in fact. It's called The Internet. So rather a fat book, and growing fatter at a quite alarming rate.
Then,
too, there's another reason why Brush Cutters and Mercedes Benz motor
cars come with instruction manuals. The manufacturers, or, to be more
accurate, the manufacturers lawyers, feel compelled to fill the first
few hundred pages with cute little pictures and long explanations
about how, if you ever go near the machine while it is running, or
bring petrol anywhere closer to the machine than a neighbouring
province, you risk losing limbs, life, children and your life savings
due to the dire hazards involved. You are warned that, should you
fail to memorise the handbook, verbatim and in its entirety, you will
automatically absolve the manufacturer of any and all traumas you
might suffer as a consequence of using the machine, up to and
including the creation of those elusive subatomic particles that physicists try to detect using the Large Hadron Collider and that create black
holes that will destroy the Earth. It's OK. Apart from the fact that
we already seem to be doing a pretty competent job of destroying the
bits of the Earth that keep it a pleasant place for humans to live,
we all know that those first hundred or so pages of the manual are
not really there for anyone to pay attention to. Anybody who actually
obeys all the instructions is likely to end up wearing a tonnage
of safety gear so great that they'd be unable to stand up without a prosthetic
exoskeleton. And that thing's going to come with its own instruction
manual, isn't it.
No, the warnings are there so that, if you do accidentally chop down the neighbour's prized Rhododendron bush, or a cow, or a planet, they're legally not to blame. It will all be your fault for not reading the small print on page 73 where it said that the machine should not be operated within 150m of any other living organism.
[1] Douglas Adams
