So here’s where we are: Time has been stolen and the world has been plunged back to a period in history when it was dark at night. All of the things we might recognize as “high-tech” don’t work anymore. And, because we placed so much confidence in that technology, nothing else does either.

Here’s the thing. You and I are technological wizards. Even if you have never had a job building databases or writing apps or figuring out how electron leak through molecule-thick semiconductor layers could impact data throughput, you are still Masters of Technology. How do I know? 

Remember the Jetsons? 

Some of you immediately flashed back to the theme song. A, hopefully large, percentage of you remember watching it on Nickelodeon. Some, perhaps, can recall your grandparents talking about it after they looked at your new tattoo: “yes, uphill in both directions and we had to watch the Jetsons in black and white.”

Okay. Do you remember George Jetson’s job? Yeah, big Trivial Pursuit whoop, everybody knows he worked for Spacely Sprockets (and the fact that you know that Spacely’s competitor was Cogswell Cogs doesn’t mean anything either). Just his job. There, in the distant future where cars flew and people lived in houses suspended in the air, George had the highest-tech job imaginable, one that completely controlled the technology he used while at the same time completely insulating him from it.

He pushed a button.

As proof that you truly are a Master of Technology I’d like you to reach into your pocket or purse and extract your cell phone. For you Luddite-smugsters thinking “I don’t have a cell phone” just look down at the keyboard of the computer you’re reading this on. In either case, what do you see? Buttons. Touch screens notwithstanding, we are living in the Jetsonian future where the entire world is controlled with buttons.

Here we are, in complete mastery of this amazing suite of high technology apparatus and, at the same time, completely, and fatally, disconnected from it; so disconnected that the actual technology is invisible to us. In fact, none of us – not you, not me, not nobody – has a clue about what technology really is.

My thought process on this got kicked off while watching Ken Burn’s new PBS show called Prohibition. I like Mr. Burn’s work as far as it goes but it does tend to drag a bit. Prohibition looks at the political, social, and economic choices behind the ill-fated policy and – if it weren’t for the fact that prohibition spans the time frame in which moving pictures were invented – the show would put you to sleep faster than driving across Kansas. During one of these quick vignettes somebody came into the frame with a contraption – as high-tech was known back in the day – that had a couple of bits sticking out of the top, one of which appeared to be spinning. He was smiling. Wait, what was that? I replayed the scene several times and was left completely baffled. While that state is not an unfamiliar one, the thing that struck me was the certainty that the guy holding the device thought it was the coolest thing; something worthy of being included on film but now, separated by only a century, the identity and purpose of which is completely forgotten.

Which brings us to where we left off last week: the humble hammer. While most of us have not forgotten that the purpose of this simple tool is to whack ourselves on the thumb while our oh-so-advanced brains are focused not where they should be, we have no idea how advanced a technology a hammer is. Hammers have been in development for millions of years. Stone hammers are documented in hominid development for over two-million years but considering that several other species also use hammer technology, the concept most likely goes back much further than that.

As many species, though not hammer literate, use different tools we can conclude that technology isn’t a human invented thing – regardless of how advanced ours has become – but something of a naturally occurring activity and, as a property of nature, can be succinctly summarized as a Law of Nature.

So now, for the first time since Ewing’s First and Second Restatements of Murphy’s Law, I will attach my name to a natural axiom. To wit:

Ewing’s Law of Technology – Technology can be said to exist when any naturally occurring material is used in a way other than that which Nature intended. The degree of such Technology is geometrically proportional to the difference between its natural purpose and its application.

From which follows:

Ewing’s Law of Technology Perception – Any Technology whose creation and use are invisible to the user will be considered a naturally occurring material.

Back to the hammer. A stone’s natural purpose is to lie in a field so something can come along and trip over it. In the distant past some animal realized: Gee, I keep hurting my foot when I hit it on this thing. I wonder what would happen if I hit it with a nut? The thing grabbed a nut and whacked the nut on the stone. The nut cracked and soon the animal was teaching all its buddies how to crack their nuts. One day, in possession of a particularly tough nut which wouldn’t crack, the animal, frustrated and angry, picked up the rock and smashed it down on the problematic pecan.

The hammer was born.

In the first nutcracker, the stone still just sat there true to its natural purpose, but our presumptive ancestor realized that the force received by the nut upon its sudden deceleration against the rock would aid in cracking it. This is a technology of the first degree. It was, unbeknownst to our pre-Newtonian predecessor, taking advantage of the physical equation Force = Mass times Acceleration. By switching the stone to moving and the nut to stationary allowed the newly developed “hammer” to greatly increase the force that could be applied on the nut because the kinetic energy of the system is enhanced by the more massive stone. Second degree. Then, some thirty-thousand years ago, somebody realized that people (by then) with longer arms were better at cracking nuts than their reach-impaired colleagues. They reasoned that they could duplicate the effect by tying their stone to a stick. By the time our exemplary hammer is recognizable as such its development has incorporated into its design considerations of the relationship of mass to force and kinetic energy, the theory of the conservation of angular momentum, and has tied together the unrelated technologies of lashing and carpentry along with all the physical, structural, and chemical knowledge needed for those technologies. Hammers are now high-tech.

Fast forward now to your local Home Depot and the roughly one-hundred ninety different hammers they sell. All of these would be instantly recognized by our troglodyte forebear, as hammers. They are still just a hard weight on the end of a stick. These days, however, instead of stone the heads are hardened steel – using the technology of metallurgy and all the developments of the past seven-thousand years; or rubber – with all the technology developed for extracting and manipulating elastomers; or plastic – and the organo-molecular synthesis developed only over the last hundred years. Wood is now sparsely represented as a handle material having been replaced by rubber bonded to metal or fiber reinforced polymer as materials of choice. Hammer technology has come so far that I’d bet that there is no one on earth who could go out and, from scratch, make a modern hammer. Today, if you want to make a hammer, you walk into a factory, sit down in front of a machine, and push a button. 

Out pops a hammer.

All of the technology behind that hammer is invisible and, from my Law of Technology Perception, as natural and expected as a stone lying in a field. The guy pushing the button expects to have hammer-grade steel. The guy making the steel expects to have high-quality iron ore and the alloying metals and blast furnaces to mix them in. Plastics for the handle or rubber for the grips? I’ll just get some from Amazon. I’m sure they’ll have them.

Today, all technology is linked together, there is no longer any “low tech”. Even our modest hammer incorporates advances in materials that would seem absolute magic to the hammer’s inventor. In that interdependence we have sown the seeds for our demise. No matter that when Time is stolen, or one of our other single-points-of-failure does, we’ll lose computers and the internet and phones and electricity. We’ll even lose hammers.

But we will recover. Somewhere – in Idaho probably – there’s some guy living in a shack in the woods cutting up cars and turning them into primitive hammers in a wood-fired forge. Just for fun. Elsewhere, there are people doing all of the things people have done for thousands of years, as hobbies. All of the skills required to rebuild society are present and accounted for, just not very common. But for those skills to spread far and wide, it would take the one thing that we would no longer have: Time.

Which begs a question. If my dire scenario did take place would we address it top-down, that is, get the newest technology working first; or bottom-up, and put all the essentials back in place and then move up the chain? There are probably valid arguments both ways. How long will it take? Ten years? Fifty? One hundred? Can we live that long without hammers?

I can picture a day far in the future where Ken Burns’ descendent has made a documentary on The Great Time Disaster of 2015. A three-dimensional display shows a flickering image of a scene on New Year’s Eve 2011. Someone is videoing a crowd and a figure walks into the frame smiling and proudly displays her new iPhone 4s. The viewer presses pause, looks at the device, rewinds, and views the scene again. And again. What the hell is that? The viewer’s brain-implanted info chip quickly returns the answer.

Oh, an iPhone, she thinks. There was a time when people used those for hammers.