tick

What makes you tick?

What makes me tick? Let me explain it to you, since I didn't always know myself. You'll have to be patient.

When you break any material into smaller parts, you cause the surface area of the material to increase. This, in turn, allows more ability to act as a catalyst or an active part of a process of change. Depending on the type of change, it could be considered to be something called progress.

Increased depth in a subject brings increased granularity of the knowledge of the subject. This, too, means that there's more surface area - but the surface area is an ongoing part of the knowledge of the material.

So lets say that this material is humanity. With all these wonderful new toys we've made - and they are wonderful, though many are dated and stupid like Tickle-Me-Elmo - we've increased our potential to be more granular. To increase our surface area. To mix our knowledge, enjoy the depth of it and also to remedy our lack of knowledge and the shallowness of what we know. When we focus on problems together, we can do wonderful things. We thought that we could do better with institutions as we knew them, but we've seen the down side of how we do institutions. Maybe part of that is because with one big block of material, we're slow to adapt.

We're molecules now, if we choose to be. We can all share what we know, we can all pass along information to the generations to come. We can discuss old ideas. We can take old ideas and make them better - or discard them if they demonstrate that they aren't as good as originally thought. We all have voices. We can all sing. We can all shout. It isn't just what some would like to sell from the bottom of their markets - it's about how we as a species can adapt and thrive more responsively.