tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6197273.post-36044527765440967552008-05-13T14:37:00.001-04:002008-05-13T15:41:51.285-04:002008-05-13T15:41:51.285-04:00Technology is traitorous. Radiohead were right about the world becoming Planet Telex, where "Everything is broken." Any video game system above Super Nintendo is a needlessly complicated black hole of time and effort. The iPod is a farce designed to break down so you must constantly buy the newest model, thus negating any money supposedly saved from not buying CDs and giving nothing instead of next to nothing to the artist. Printers never know how to eat paper right, despite my feeding it and feeding it and feeding it a feast of frustration. The load of the computer is rarely worth bearing. All the data in the world won't buy back the soul you never had. There is no ghost in the machine, no master node to the network; only indestructible sterility for terabytes on end.<br /><br />Luddism is not a viable or coherent ideology but it would be primitive carthasis for hammer to say hello to CPU. Machines break down and are discarded like deformed Spartan babies. The rate of obsolescence exceeds the rate of mindful absorption. Simple, sundry books wear and tear but last. As they are passed down to a diminishing few their preciousness only grows. Formats change so fast our cutting-edge media will be unreadable to the post-digital archaeologists of the future. The public record that is the Internet won't have a gramophone to play it. By trying to be in advance of the future we short-circuit ourselves out of the timestream. At least Ozymandias left a statue; our desert of 1s and 0s will leave no simulacrum of life to inspire poetry, if poetry is still around.<br /><br />High-definition surround-sound cocoons all advertise themselves with the same implicit slogan: "Leave your home without ever leaving your home!" Well I want to leave my home! I want to have to go places to get things! I'm not a dripfeed-sucking amorphous mouth attached to a stomach defecating meta-content to be fed again, I'm an ape with all appropriate parts attached, and sometimes I like to swing from trees. Despite what the hyper-modern three-fifths of me says, I need sex, not computer porn; human contact, not virtual interaction; physical movement, not Nintendo pantomime; birdsong, not lifeless hum; experience, not television; live music, not memorex and player pianos. I may not live up to my ideals but I have them, and though I communicate them through machine I yearn to sear them in my flesh.¡Benjaminista!http://www.blogger.com/profile/02269787398676976279noreply@blogger.com