Tech's role in setting conceptual standards

The whole spectrum of "technology" covers scales of thought from practical, daily things like scratching out a note, poem, or email to rethinking the whole role of tech in the lives of men. It's hard to know where on this spectrum to jump in, but I'd start by advocating things that feel right, feel unifying rather than divisive. To this end I'd like to see universal rather than proprietary file formats. I don't know how universal you can get; for instance, can you somehow unify text, graphics, and database data within a conceptually larger format without making filesizes unnecessarily larger? I can visualize a future where we basically have two distinctions when it comes to "files": tools and data. Of course this is how it works even in the present, but the reality is that EXE "files" are accompanied by DLLs, registry values, and countless other hangers-on, while date "files" come in a thousand different flavors, very few of which play nice with the others.

Let's have Tools be self-contained and portable, and Data be universally accessed (perhaps with some standards body overseeing backwards-compatible changes to keep up with unforseen progress in Tools). Thus, you wouldn't have a need for filetypes at all; a Data document could contain text, graphics, video, music, or anything else. Tools would operate on Data documents but a user's experience would be Data-centered rather than Tool-centered, as it is now. Apple has tried to introduce this idea in the past with OpenDoc, and Adobe has thrown PDF into the arena. XML (itself a subset of SGML) is the format currently most worthy of the title "universal," but it faces an uncertain future. Probably something that emerges from XML will lay claim to being the first universal format, and the concept will develop from there.

At any rate, the convergence of technology into open standards, if it happens, will if nothing else ensure that "progress" is subject to a more democratic ratification process than if it were simply left to the corporation with the most resources. This latter situation, equivalent to a technological monarchy, has been the default situation since private industry subverted the populist aims of the founding fathers and surpassed government in its control of our daily experiences. That this happened is only natural, as any student of Darwin would attest. However, if we are to achieve a post-darwinian societal enlightenment, an engineered happiness free from "fitness struggles" (and this is by no means a certainty), then we will have to retake the high ground from the elites. As simple as it may sound, universal data structuring is an important step in that direction.