Patents Office Guy

The Big Issue, 24 February 1997

In 1900, someone once told me, the head of the Patents Office in Britain declared himself out of a job. There was no need for a Patents Office any longer, he announced, as there would be no more requests for patents. Everything that could possibly be invented had been already, there was no way that anything new could be created, and so we may as well just shut the whole jolly operation down, chaps.

To me this is absolutely fascinating. I try and imagine this guy (for some reason I always see him in uniform and with a fluffy moustache) and what went on in his head, the way he must have looked at the world. The rate of technological change by the end of last century had reached an unprecedented pace and everyone was probably feeling a little bit overwhelmed by all the new stuff in their previously familiar and comfortable world. But most people seem to react to times of change with a kind of pre-apocalyptic anxiety, predicting that things will just get bigger and faster and worse until the whole shebang comes crashing down, or alternatively until we colonise the solar system and can go and resume a nice peaceful sheltered life in orbit around Jupiter. But not Patents Office Guy (as I have come to know him in the course of my ruminations). He wasn't troubled by any such ridiculous speculation or terrifying attacks of open-mindedness. "No, no, no," he said, "look, it's all just gone far enough. Any further would just be silly really wouldn't it? Let's be realistic: there are a limited number of things in the world and a limited number of combinations in which they can be put together, and the amount of things invented over the last few years has been so astonishingly large that there can be no doubt we have exhausted the possibilities."

Patent Office Guy's world was such a finite, ordered, stable kind of a place that he felt perfectly justified in calling a halt to progress and declaring an eternal status quo from here on. No 'stop the world, I want to get off' for him -- his determination that there should be No More New Stuff was so ingrained he couldn't even recognise it as his own desire, seeing it instead as an inevitable fact of life. "Stop pretending the world's still moving" would be more his line.

I wonder what Patents Office Guy would think if he could somehow be resurrected today, in 1997. Another century of predictions of impending apocalypse has passed, apocalypse-less (barely), and a fair number of new things have been invented since his day. I wonder if he would acknowledge their existence, or simply refuse to believe they were real so as to preserve his fragile grip on the universe? What would his views on virtual reality, or nuclear weapons, or space travel be? How would he feel about the fact that scientists are now patenting human genes? And I wonder how he would react to the imminent turn of the millenium? (Probably he'd announce that all the interesting things people can do with their lives have been done, and declare mass suicide as the only reasonable course of action.)

In some ways it would be nice to be a Patents Office Guy today, to just calmly and rationally say "OK, it's all been fun and very interesting, well done you chaps at MIT and so forth, thanks awfully but we won't be needing you any more. We're just going to stop things right about here." Or at least to freeze things where they are for a while, just to let us get our breath back. Face it, we could do with a bit of a pitstop -- an opportunity to let our mental capabilities catch up to our material ones, to give the human race a bit of a chance against the arms race. Then we'd have some time to contemplate what we already have and how it can best be utilised.

I mean, we can send robots out into space to analyse the atmospheres of other planets and we can't even keep our own in working order. We can record images, manipulate them and send them anywhere in the world at the speed of light, and a billion people see every episode of 'Baywatch'. We have a communications system heralded as a revolutionary new method of democratic information-sharing, and around 1 percent of the world's population has access to it. We're capable of feeding 7 billion people, yet 20 percent of the 5.5 billion there are go hungry. So how about it, Patents Office Guy? In your name I declare a temporary halt to research and development everywhere. Progress will resume when we've got our heads together.