Anderson tells the story of attending a conference on information technologies in Germany. A very old professor, who specializes in predicting the future of information, uses a food analogy to explain the current need for information:
EXCERPT FROM THE SPEED OF DARKNESS (1997)
Laurie Anderson
We are again in the hunting and gathering stage but this time we hunting for information. Trying to grab whatever rushes by. And it's all really disorganized and there are no restaurants, no recipes yet. We're just sort of foraging. But the food analogy explained a lot to me because the frantic part of the digital revolution seems like a kind of real hunger. People really seem hungry. They seem starving for information. And even more so, they're starving for new equipment. And as technologies escalate and things get faster, a lot of people get caught up in what amounts to a sorta personal arms race, building up arsenals of equipment. And, for what? And so you have to keep getting more and more stuff, endlessly. More bandwidth, more storage, more memory, more speed. And you will never, ever have enough. It's like you're in a race against speed itself.
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