Rust Never Sleeps
Once there was the individual, and then there was the village, then the community, the town, workers, the group, the company, the commonwealth, the teeming masses, the corporation, the assembly line, the workforce, the cooperative, the venture, and a generation ago there arrived the idea of team.
All in search of better, faster, cheaper. The race never changes, just the course. Now, what’s next?
They have a proverb in the Netherlands, Rust Roest — if you’re a fan of Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps album you’re about halfway to a translation. Rust rests. Which is to say, when you use iron, it serves you. When you let it rest, it rusts, decays, becomes useless. He not busy being born is busy dying, as our Nobel Laureate rocker Bob Dylan expressed it.
Innovation is a means of survival because it is the making of new things from ancient ingredients — that’s all it is. A recombination. The original atoms we use were manufactured billions of years ago in nameless supernovae and are all the materials we have or are likely to ever have, and our work lies in the recipes, the mixing, the baking of them. Innovation is one giant episode of Top Chef. They rise, these new materials and ideas, like loaves of bread in an oven, only to be themselves combined, used, re-worked, or consumed — all to extract energy and functionality.
I suppose what we are aiming for in the 21st century is a means of innovation that is as silent (and thereby, universal beyond language), replicable, swift, painless and relentlessly progressing as the evolution of a protein, as nature’s innovations themselves.
