The Chain Smoking Blue Monkey Explained
We humans like to get things done. We like processes and we like outcomes. Sure, we like chaos and novelty too, but we like all of that in service of the grand scheme we are concoting in our heads about some sort of idealized outcome. The outcome is basically a fantasy we have about what the future is going to be like. These fantasies come in all sorts of sizes. We are familiar with the big ones like “have a career in that thing I like… I think” and “find a cute person to mate with” and “god, if I don’t quit this job soon…” and the more ambitious “…and rule the world! MUAHAHAHAHA!”
It turns out that many outcome fantasies are smaller than these. They are not big fantasies at all. They get assigned smaller names than fantasies. They are “tasks” or “to do items” or “that shit I have to get done by the end of the week.”
How we get to the idealized outcomes, achieve those fantasies, seems important to us, although it may not be very important at all. It may seem important in the midst of attempting to achieve that outcome. Increasingly what helps us achieve these fantasies, these tasks and to do lists, are systems for managing the information. What we use to manage our information are computers. Because of that, computers (and all its far flung family of information processing and management devices) seem important.
What we really want out computers and their relatives is to help us turn our fantasies into reality. Comptuers aren’t important. The freaky information wrangly family is not important. Achieving the fantasy is important.
All of the importance we place on technology in our daily lives may be very misplaced and miscalculated (but not entirely and not always) . What we really care about are the outcomes that technology helps us achieve. We often act like we care about the technology itself, but ultimately we care about achieving something else altogether. If something else could do the same job as a computer, or a telephone, or a PDA, or a pencil, we would use it. If a chain smoking blue monkey could do the same thing a computer does, and do it slightly better, people would start using the monkey.