Permanent Innovation

A couple of times a few years ago I heard the phrase “permanent innovation” or a close variation thereof. The intro to the J.J. Abrams produced show ‘Almost Human’ talks about runaway technological advancement, and a podcast of BBC’s HARDTalk featured Roberto Unger, the Brazilian political theorist, who used the exact phrase to emphasize how trickle-down technology is not the-rule-of-the-day but should be.

In tandem, I have been noticing Big Data companies springing up in Montreal lately each analyzing aspects of network/social/mobile traffic. I can only imagine that this is similarly going on worldwide since as far as I know Montreal is not particularly a Big Data hub like it is, for example, for 3D software.

Indeed, if there will be, or already is, a kind of “permanent innovation”, I tend to see aspects of these Big Data companies, along with perhaps visualization accents courtesy of Montreal’s powerhouse multimedia concerns, bleed-into-one-another, especially as they all act upon, and within, one giant collective dataset (read: the internet).

This “permanent innovation” – I believe – will increasingly act upon a kind of world computer, always on, always networked, always updating – in real time.