It always takes me a while when I'm watching Alan Kay deliver prepared remarks because his emphasis doesn't seem to match the emphasis of his speech. In this c

It always takes me a while when I'm watching Alan Kay deliver prepared remarks because his emphasis doesn't seem to match the emphasis of his speech. In this case it strikes me that he's trying to evoke the enormity of human history -- hundreds of thousands of years -- and the surprise that we've only really been trying to "step outside ourselves" for about five hundred. Somehow at least 99.5% of that time has been spent in the fogs before enquiry and only the last 0.5% have we really seen the explosion of mathematics, the emergence of science, and the industrial revolution. That we can fool ourselves allows us to dream of the world to come, but it also eats itself: it locks us in a prison of our own minds. So that is the emphasis that I see in this talk, after puzzling through it in my head for a bit. This may be true, but I worry that this has been too limited an approach to history. As an artist whose works will likely be lost to history, I must object that there seem to be more artists than ever talked about, more soul-seekers lighting fires than fires that burned across history: most trickle away into embers. What if the problem isn't that we're always fooling ourselves -- i.e. that we never light fires -- and rather that we have simply not had the right environment for the fires to explode the way they do? What if, say, ideas became properties of trade routes rather than properties of cultures, and the Dark Ages somehow stabilized these trade routes so that the ideas could finally diffuse from one route to another? It's only a half-baked idea at present, but I'm just not sure that this relatively recent explosion in innovation is due entirely to the fact that people got locked inside their own beliefs. Perhaps that is me getting locked inside my own beliefs though -- beliefs that we are all cosmopolitan and curious and earnest inside.