After years of thinking big, the world is finally celebrating smallness. At least, that’s view of the New York Times. Yes, it ignores the fact that the Japanese have been obsessed with miniaturization for centuries and Europe has never wholeheartedly shared the US obsession with big cars or big hair, but there’s some truth in it, too.
Is Small really the new Big?
The launch of Tata’s $2000 Nano car is the hook for the ‘Ideas for a Small World’ op-ed in the NYT Weekly supplement with yesterday’s Observer.
‘After decades of being driven by the urge to acquire something bigger and better, the small, the efficient and the uncomplicated may be what helps people avoid the big bloat,’ opines the NYT, side-stepping the environmental impact of making a terrifyingly cheap car available to the planet’s burgeoning middle class. Even if it does 60mpg.
Still, what right does anyone have to deny the developing economies some of the luxuries that make life so pleasant in the West? I’m a big fan of smallness. Long before the Tata Nano – and its iPod namesake – gadgeteers have lusted after the miniature, their appetites whetted by Sony’s portable radios and sated by the Gordon Moore’s self-fulfilling prophecy of the doubling, every 2 years, of the amount of transistors that can be fitted onto a silicon chip.
But Moore admitted “The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens”.
Ironically, just as disaster looms , thereby arresting the march towards miniaturization, so the NYT’s other cited trends – efficiency and simplicity – are coming to the fore. Efficiency to make the darned hot chips run cool, and simplicity to make them actually perform a useful function for us organic lifeforms.
Yes, recession and overpopulation will heighten the cult of small. Smaller shops and reduced packaging make simple economic sense right now. But more dramatic and revolutionary is the way our relationship with technology – and, through it, our own, small worlds – is being radically transformed by natural gesture control, microblogging and intelligent, nuanced networks.
Smallness doesn’t signify a lack of ambition. It signifies a purity of thought. A sublime brevity. I’m all for it. Which is why I’m going to stop right now.
