From Culture to Technology

Zack Lynch, whom I spent an unbloggable New Years Eve with, relates a story of cultural change, how Cubism fostered Camouflage technology:

...As Stephen Kern points out in The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, this example is not only intellectually interesting, but yields a deep insight into the nature of societal change. "In cultural histories the causal arrow usually runs from technology to culture. In the case of cubism and camouflage, however, it went the other way, from cubist art to war technology."...

Perhaps this relates to the users drive policy discussion. Artifacts of culture represents underlying society and its technology. Similar to how danah paraphrased Cory:

Now, i don't know much about science fiction, but i read it once in a while to understand the models that technologists are trying to mimic. When i asked Cory about the relationship between scifi and technology, he told me that scifi is not supposed to be prescriptive. Scifi is modeled after what exists today and is not a representation of the future. Quite often, very little in the way of technology is fully fleshed out. In this regard, he's quite accurate. Even his own Whuffie (which i hear about in way too many meetings on reputation) is barely detailed in "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." Still, while scifi shouldn't be prescriptive, many technologists interpolate the ideas presented and flesh it out to be beyond problematic. Often, they have the nerve to refer to the fiction books as their model for why it is a good idea.

So every once and a while, art inspires and craft begets craft.