In the last episode, we looked at a few different scales — implicitly, from technology and product life cycles, through writing, biology and genetic information all the way across the universe back to the Big Bang itself.
Seen this way, the irony of seeing writing and written langages as something permanent becomes crystal clear. Perhaps the only thing more ironic is pretending to rely on techologies which reach the end of their life cycles in less than a couple years, let alone a couple generations (of homo sapiens).
Speaking of humans, while it should now be obvious that so-called “natural” languages do not scale across time very well, they do scale rather instantaneously across humans and humanity. While it takes just a few years for a human to acquire native language(s), communications and understanding using these languages are hard-wired throughout a human’s lifetime, they are the operating systems that seem very much the fundamental firmware … unquestionable, hard as rock, rock-solid.
Of course, when we look at natural languages meticulously, we can see variations of dialect, across generations and many more nuances. Yet these variations pale in comparison to the power of soundbite truths touted to millions (if not billions) of humans — day in, day out, over and over, drummed into the unconscious minds and repeated not only daily but also every night for hours on end in our dreams.
While billions (if not trillions) is invested in brand names [1], words flow out like endless rain across humanity — completely free of charge. Perhaps not all words, but in any case soundbite words. How many words? Which words? …? It depends — mainly on the nature of the communities within which the natural languages are indigenous (see also https://indigenous.news.blog ).
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