If you think about what was in the theaters at the time, the cuts and tone of this aren’t so astonishing in the wake of Kustom Kar Kommandos, 2001, or the Wild Bunch (Ok, so it predates those two by a year or so). But it seems to tap the zeitgeist, the idea of computing technology simplifying things. These are the things Toffler is already talking about in best sellers like Future Shock

This piece is thinking about information and data as *paper,* conflating the information with the substrate its stored on. Once information is *digital*, people start mining it, cross-tabulating it, feeding it back into itself, all of which creates more… information. What are needed, of course, are tools for dealing with complexity. Tools for thinking through it. Semiotic and semantic tools for context and significance. 

Yet there’s a stridency here, a tone of deadness and terror, the feeling of being on the edge of a great precipice. Nobody could see Google from here, or the Phoenix Program, or genome mapping, the sheer scale of the trajectory about the leap asymptotically into the bandwidth saturated skies of the smarter planet and the labyrinths deep beneath its surface. 

nickelcobalt:

“Paperwork Explosion” (by HensonCompany)

In 1967, Henson was contracted by IBM to make a film extolling the virtues of their new technology, the MT/ST, a primitive word processor. The film would explore how the MT/ST would help control the massive amount of documents generated by a typical business office. Paperwork Explosion, produced in October 1967, is a quick-cut montage of images and words illustrating the intensity and pace of modern business. Henson collaborated with Raymond Scott on the electronic sound track.

“Machines should work. People should think.”