Noticing technology

Technology has a way of democratizing everything. The easiest one to realize this is the printing press, which brought the bible to the masses, moving services away from the Latin-only masses (the other kind of mass) and communication to the Christian God to the common man. But these days, technology continues at such a seriously fast pace that it's democratizing more and more, faster and faster.

These days, anyone can start a company. With the intarweb, it has become easier and easier to reach more and more people, with niche markets becoming a valid, legitimate way to individual, sustainable work. As I've nominally grown up with the web, many of the changes in it, those happening on and around it, haven't much surprised me. Most steps are small, building on previous work, putting a different spin on the same idea. Much of it, though still interesting, fails to feel magical or impressive.

Until you realize, again, that technology is amazing in its ability to provide opportunity to anyone who is willing to seize it, that it helps to democratize the world, that it can change lives in unexpected ways.

Or, that it can become so common that it fails to be impressive until you really look or are forced to notice it.

Three days ago, David Weekly tweeted:

I know not the origin or circumstances of his tweet, and I didn't really pay much attention to it at the time. When I walked into the Urban Picnic, a local lunch spot for Mom and her cowokers, and saw this setup, however, I recalled it:

Our orders were entered on an iPad, my credit card run through either the Square on the side, or the (apparently newly added) traditional POS card reader on the side. Ten minutes later, we were eating incredibly tasty organic sandwiches at some small tables outside the restaurant. The restaurant itself was nicely decorated, but not over the top. The two employees we saw looked like brothers, so say that they are.

I looked around and thought, wow, okay, the investment to start a new business, to start a new restaurant is thousands less than it was a decade ago. The cash registers along were behemoths and the hoops that needed to be jumped through to process credit cards were so numerous. At this point, wow, uh, no.

In a row of empty shops, knowing that technology has lowered the barriers to entry is a breath of fresh air.