I mean something very precise by that so I'm going to try to explain with an analogy imagined imagine you adopt a puppy so 00:15:01 your Duff is puppy and your name um puddles you take puddles home and you give them a little snack and you stick puddles in the cage and you lock the door forever and never open it again and 00:15:14 puddle slips out the rest of his poor life trapped inside this little cage so that's wrong I think most of us would agree that's sadistic that obviously inhumane so well let's ask what exactly 00:15:27 is wrong about that you know what what is inhuman about sticking puddles in the cage well you know we kind of have a notion of what it means to live a full doggy life right dogs have to run around dogs run 00:15:40 around and they sniff other dogs and they pee on things and that's kind of what it means to be a dog they've inherited this the set of capabilities capabilities and traits from their wolf ancestors and we recognize that a dog 00:15:53 has to be allowed the full free expression of its entire range of capabilities by sticking the cage or constraining his range of experience you're not letting him do all the things that dogs can do and this is exactly 00:16:07 what we've done to ourselves we've invented media that severely constrained our range of intellectual experience that of all the many capabilities that 00:16:19 we have all the many ways of thinking that we have we have constrained ourselves to a tiny subset we're not allowed to use our full intellect

you can think about the invention of powerful representations and the invention of powerful media to host powerful 00:11:27 representations as being one of the big drivers of last 2,000 years of the intellectual progress of humanity because each representation allows us to think thoughts that we couldn't think before we kind of 00:11:39 continuously expand our think about territory so you can think of this as tied to you know the grand meta-narrative of the scent of humanity moving away from myth and superstition 00:11:51 and ignorance and towards a deeper understanding of ourselves in the world around us I bring this up explicitly because I think it's good for people to acknowledge the motivation for their 00:12:02 work and this is this story of the intellectual progress of humanity is something that I find very motivating inspiring and is something that I feel like I want to contribute to but I think 00:12:16 that if this if you take this as your motivation you kind of have to be honest with yourself that that there definitely has been ascent we have improved in many 00:12:27 ways but there are also other ways in which our history has not been ascent so we invent technology we media technology 00:12:39 to kind of help us make this this climb but every technology is a double-edged sword every technology enables us has a potential de navels in certain ways while debilitating us in other ways and 00:12:51 that's especially true for representations because the way the reputations work is they draw on certain capabilities that we have so if we go all in in a particular medium like we 00:13:03 did with print so the capabilities that are not well supported in that medium they get neglected in they atrophy and we atrophy I wish I knew who drew the picture 00:13:20 because it's it's a wonderful depiction of what I'm trying to express here and even a little misleading because the person the last stage they're kind of hunched over is tiny rectangle we reach 00:13:31 that stage accomplish that stage with the printing press and cheap paper book based knowledge the invention of paper-based bureaucracy paper-based 00:13:44 working we invented this lifestyle this way of working where to do knowledge work meant to sit at a desk and stare at your little tiny rectangle make a little motions of your hand you know started 00:13:56 out as sitting at a desk staring at papers or books and making little motions with a pen and now it's sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen making a little motions with your on a keyboard but it's basically the same 00:14:08 thing we've this is what it means to do knowledge work nowadays this is what it means to be a thinker it means to be sitting and working with symbols on a little tiny rectangle to the extent that 00:14:20 again it almost seems inseparable you can't separate the representation for what it actually is and and this is basically just an accident of history this is just the way that our media 00:14:32 technology happen to evolve and then we kind of designed a way of knowledge work for that media that we happen to have and I think so I'm going to make the claim that this style of knowledge work 00:14:47 this lifestyle is inhumane

I was particularly interested in Chris Aldrich’s observation that knowledge workers tend to talk in spatial terms about their work, especially if distracted. Following interruptions by colleagues or phone calls at work, people may frequently ask themselves “where was I?” more frequently than “what was I doing?” This colloquialism isn’t surprising as our memories for visual items and location are much stronger than actions. Knowledge workers will look around at their environments for contextual clues for what they were doing and find them in piles of paper on their desks, tabs in their computer browser, or even documents (physical or virtual) on their desktops.

knowledge workers—business professionals who interpret and transform information (Drucker, 1973).