Kevin Kelly defines “technology” on his blog:

“I want to suggest a theory for technology, a framework that might provide a logic and context for this parade of new things in our lives. But I have to start with the fact that we have a warped idea of what technology is. A lot of us tend to think that technology is ‘anything that was invented after you were born.’ Or technology is: ‘anything that doesn’t work yet.’ As if only the new is what we are talking about.

But of course technology includes old inventions, like clocks and levers, and ancient materials that work very well, like concrete and bricks. The bulk of technology in our lives was invented long before we were born. Ordinary technology also contains intangible ‘stuff’ that we usually don’t see such as calendars, bookkeeping principles, law, and software. It includes large complex things like social organizations and cities. Technology is all this, the old, the invisible, the large and the new — the accumulated usefulness that our minds invent.”

On his site, Kevin Kelly’s opines on “Seeking Sustainable Disequilibrium,” which seems to be happening whether we seek it or not, as we ride the wave of the great paradigm shift through the Information Age. An excerpt:

“In the industrial perspective, the economy was a machine that was to be tweaked to optimal efficiency, and once finely tuned, maintained in productive harmony. Companies or industries especially productive of jobs or goods had to be protected and cherished at all costs, as if these firms were rare watches in a glass case.

As networks have permeated our world, the economy has come to resemble an ecology of organisms, interlinked and coevolving, constantly in flux, deeply tangled, ever expanding at its edges. As we know from recent ecological studies, no balance exists in nature; rather, as evolution proceeds, there is perpetual disruption as new species displace old, as natural biomes shift in their makeup, and as organisms and environments transform each other.

Even the archetypal glories of hardwood forests or coastal wetlands, with their apparent wondrous harmony of species, are temporary federations on the move. Harmony in nature is fleeting. Over relatively short periods of biological time, the mix of species churns, the location of ecosystems drift, and the roster of animals and plants changes as they come and go.

So it is with network perspective: companies come and go quickly, careers are patchworks of vocations, industries are indefinite groupings of fluctuating firms.”