Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

We store more information on computers. And we FIND it all.

Back in ’07 (2007 for those who don’t know an old old way of writing the dates in the first decade of a century), I had a conversation with a senior manager of a government agency. Like 98.6% of senior managers, he was not aware of a major yet simple change happening in front of him.

“Yes, we can remember everything,” I told him.

New things were happening: Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, Wikipedia, Wikimedia, and ever less expensive computer hardware and networks. And ever more folks willing to type a few words and do some copying and pasting.

And along with all this stuff was the idea of search. Searching changed from searching to FINDING. Knowledge was right in front of us. Finding was practical. We could remember and recall everything.

Old news. Today, however, multiply that finding by 1,000 or 1,000 times 1,000 times whatever. Events of January and February 2025 show that some folks who can write a few lines of code can have the computer crawl through a computer network and highlight where money was spent. The famous cases show where the taxpayers’ money was spent. Yikes! And senior government agency managers are still clueless about such. Yes, folks can FIND where folks spend money.

We can remember everything. Sometimes that is embarrassing to some persons. Often, however, it is enlightening. We can remember everything. Let’s do so and use what we remember.