I was talking to my friend Mark van Harmelen of Hedtek (of whom more in a later post) about setting off on this path, and he gave me this quote from Elon Musk;
Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.
This was meant kindly, of course; did I really want to put myself in this position, this level of stress?
There are two parts to a response to this; firstly, do I believe that this really what it’s like?
Why? Why am I doing this? In a sense, it would seem as if I’m abandoning what people who have known me for a while would say was more a vocation than a career in architecture.
In fact, I see it as a way of satisfying the same drive by other means. For some architects, and I’m certainly one, the attraction of architectural work is that it allows you to first imagine and then make new bits of the world that work better – that are more beautiful, more humane, more efficient.
The world of digital technology offers these same possibilities but significantly, it allows the solutions to be unchained from the weight and drag of the physical world – offers scalability, ubiquity, relevance, impact beyond that of any but the most iconic of buildings.
More than that, the digital world is new, uncharted – the space of the unexplored and even the unimagined is so much larger than the territory that has been mapped out, and unlike the real-world, this is a multi-dimensional, self-referential space, where each new invention can spawn whole universes of implied possibility.
It seems trite and trivial to say it, but I am convinced that we are merely in the low foothills of what a digital culture that includes the vast bulk of humanity will offer.
Digital Anthropology 