simolinic

marieyall:

flannelowl:

marieyall:

thecamcorder:

marieyall:

Continuing on in the vein of ‘things I hate,’ I hate the Kindle (and similar devices). I love books (please see: my room), I have a really sentimental story about why but that’s for another time, and the Kindle is just another machine substituting for reality.

I hate the thought of a Kindle replacing someone’s book collection. Is it worth it to have a Kindle instead of bookshelves?If you want to read a book and you can’t make room for it in your bag or suitcase then you don’t really want to read a book. Most books are designed to be portable. Do you really need the extra space for more Urban Outfitters wall decorations or something? Why is there this movement to ‘unclutter’ our lives by purchasing these expensive and fragile gadgets that replace other things? Why do people think they need these things?

I’m grumbly about all of it and resistant to a lot of new technology. I’m from the country and in a lot of ways I am very old-fashioned. But while I’m typing this I’m facing a good portion of the books I own and I can’t imagine them not being a part of my life.

I’m usually the first person to jump on the AWESOME NEW TECHNOLOGY train. I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff. That said, I am 100% with you on the Kindle. I just love having books around. They have so much character. You can’t get that from a machine.

Besides, they really are portable. Most people aren’t dragging around five copies of War and Peace, so I don’t see why it’s such an issue to take a book with you.

ALSO: A number of years ago, when everyone was really jumping on the download/digital train for the first time, someone pointed out that we aren’t leaving a trace of our society. All the books and art and photos and other artifacts from past civilizations exist and tell us about what life was like during that time period because they were tangible. What will people think of us when all they can find are pieces of metal and plastic that don’t function?

PS: Forgive my BROAD stroke generalizations. It’s not a water-tight hypothesis by any means. Just a thought/fear.

There are so, so many things that bother me about it. I hate this age of convenience we’re ushering ourselves into. You don’t have to turn the page! Or go to the bookstore! or the library! Or, like, Netflix or digital downloads of movies — you don’t have to drive to the video rental store! Or, like iTunes — no going to the record store! So many things are telling us that flipping through things and walking through aisles at the store are these huge hassles and we need to spend hundreds of dollars on tiny machines that will eliminate the need for such time-wasting activities. It’s so ridiculous.

I really hate how temporary everything is, too. The vast majority of the books I own are much older than my laptop, desktop, cell phone, iPod, et cetera, and they will definitely outlive all of those things. It’s strange to me to invest so much — not just money — into machines that are only relevant for a few years.

I was arguing a little bit ago with a friend who is understandably enamored with the iPhone.  He thought that kids should be taught in school and tested on how to find information “in the cloud” using iPhone-type devices, as opposed to actually learning the information.  This way, every person becomes a high-functioning user of and contributor to humanity’s great internet connection experience, and that network will be there for people to call on instantly whenever they need it and it will improve everyone’s lives.

In some ways, his argument is understandable and it comes straight out of the modern push toward digital singularity and so-called “convenience,” and I almost felt like the crazy one for pointing out the fact that all those devices are so temporary.  The internet—“the cloud”—itself is temporary.  We can’t rely on it for everything.  It’s a useful tool, but it can’t be the only tool.  It could all just disappear in an instant.

It’s nice that we all have such faith that our way of life will continue on, but I don’t want us to become like the people that build their town at the bottom of a dam and then act surprised when it bursts and destroys everything they built.  Much that we have progressed to in the last fifty to one hundred years is so fragile and reliant on some very tenuous things like, for example, consistent oil and water supplies, relative peace and political stability (which we get at the expense of other countries’ peace and stability), and an agreeable climate.  I’m grateful that things are like this right now, but I try to keep awareness that all that can change so quickly…that’s just the reality.

Yet somehow I just sounded like a wacko luddite conspiracy-theorizing survivalist in that conversation.

I feel like we’re all setting ourselves up for some kind of collapse. Maybe that’s not the best attitude to have — rejecting or at least resisting technology assuming that some disaster could render it useless — but I have more faith in more concrete things, like information itself (versus ways to find it), than the virtual methods we use to find it.

That being said, I like the Internet. I like being connected to other people, and being able to find out so many things instantly, even though I hate the overstimulation that has accompanied technology lately. The ability to find information instantly creates pressure to know things instantly. If I’m away from a computer and don’t know something I find myself frustrated because I can’t find it. Being connected to people I otherwise wouldn’t keep in touch with makes me feel obligated to talk to them more. It’s hard to resist multitasking when watching a movie at home. And I already have a problem focusing on things. But at the rate things are developing, so much of what we use today will be obsolete. No one uses a computer made in the ’90s anymore.

Also, I’d rather be a survivalist than a deluded iPhone addict.*

*No offense to any of my friends with iPhones (specifically Beth, since she uses one, but I don’t think she’s deluded).

Okay, sorry I don’t know you and if I’m butting in, but this is the public internet; and also everything I’m about to say, even though at moments it doesn’t sound like it, comes from love and exuberance (at times a not-so-speculative sciencey love) and I would be more than happy to continue this discussion either on Tumblr or over tea, because I’m on the internet but I’m also in Athens and that’s all pertinent:

Here’s some of what I’m getting from you.

Temporary. Fragile. Scary. Collapse.

“I have more faith in more concrete things, like information itself … than the virtual methods we use to find it.”

Which, yeah, is understandable. But my response to that is:

Information is nothing unless it is communicated. Information exists in the mind as electricity being passed around among cells; if the power goes out — when you die — the information is erased. If two people have a conversation, information is transferred, generated, and rearranged by temporary disturbances in the air between mouths and ears. The sounds you make when you speak bounce around whatever space you’re in for at most a few seconds, and then disperse to the point of complete uselessness. The “information” only persists as long as someone is there to speak and hear, and to care about what they’re saying or hearing, and then after that only as long as both brains keeping passing their currents around, keep accessing that information to keep it fresh, or transmit it to another person.

That’s scary; the things I whispered tenderly yesterday exist only in the ultimately fragile biochemical containers of me and my love. Naturally, I want to remember those things. So I write them down. They go into my notebook for ostensibly personal recollection, or — to increase the chance that they survive — I send them in a letter, so that they are further communicated. Or I put them in a song, which is engineered to be sticky and embed itself in the minds of listeners. Then everyone who hears my song will remember and enjoy those sacred words, those bits of information. Or reads my poem,  or my novel, or my whatever.

But I can only play my song so many times for so many people before some catastrophe will strike me… so I have to record my song, and distribute it as widely as possible. I have to write down the lyrics and include them as liner notes, so that if the music’s medium breaks — because it will break, as all physical things break eventually — then it can still be read, and if the book gets lost then there will be other copies belonging to other people. So the information continues to persist, though at this stage it’s several steps removed from its original context and intent, so we can’t really be sure that the owner of my vinyl/8-track/cassette/compact disc/etc. (each an ostensibly-more-durable media for the same content) is really holding in their mental flickerings the same information I wanted to preserve. But it’s close.

… You’ve probably already gotten the point I’m heavy-handing. Didn’t you just record an album, Marie? (I’m basing that off the snippets from your Tumblr; I don’t know you at all besides that.) You’re trying to preserve your created information. Which you should! But what I’m saying is — all information exists as the “virtual method” that is used to preserve and transmit it. Even talking, even just thinking and remembering, even books — yes, even books — are just flickers and deteriorating. Your books don’t persist eternally, barring fire; they’re breaking down, the pages and glue are drying, the ink is fading, the atmosphere is working its inexorable virulent destructive nature on the books that are exuding their character onto you even now.

I’m really not a big entropy-type guy, actually, but I’m using all this breakdown imagery to lead to a more positive point.

… Because, yeah, I think books’ slow decay is fairly beautiful, too, and I acknowledge that’s part of the appeal. Books feel like they belong in your temporary world, because they’re affected by time, but they are affected at, hopefully, a slightly slower pace than you are. You could foreseeably carry the same books with you your entire life, again barring disaster. I don’t think it’s the fact that an iPod breaks that really bothers you, but just, as you say, that it feels less trustworthy, and also (this is my interpolation) that it moves at a much more rapid pace than you do. Its lifespan is insect-like compared to the average 70ish human years. No one really keeps insects as pets, and it’s largely because you can’t get attached. Yeah, gross-out factor or whatever, but I really think a big ingredient in a beetle’s inhuman appearance is that its sense of time is so different… that’s probably another discussion.

What I get from your blogging is that you’re fine with accepting the temporary nature of books because you prefer them aesthetically, and because they exist more in line with your sense of the pace of life.

I want to jump several steps ahead to get a point out: a possible world. A world in which:

The power can’t go out, because the smart grid is powered by so many distributed nondestructive power sources (solar yadda yadda) that we literally cannot run out of electricity;

Wireless internet (or its conceptual successor) coats the earth, again via distributed nodes so durable that they rarely break, or so numerous and cheap that their durability is irrelevant, and when they do break the gap is covered multiple times, and the system detects the outage and dispatches a repair or replacement, so that there is nowhere you cannot interface with the internet, but also that the transmitters are so small or so well-integrated that they either do not interfere with, or in some way enhance, the landscape;

Solid-state memory (hundreds of times more reliable than the hard disks you’re used to) or some other technology has become so abundant and so networked that, as Google and others are already doing, every bit of data is replicated many times across the network, so that even if one physical disk dies, its information is already secure in dozens of other places;

Your devices have access to that space, so that anything you save literally CANNOT be destroyed, because even if your copy is destroyed, you can get another device and re-download everything you’ve ever saved,

And the devices themselves reach a point where they are as cheap as books are now (recall that there was a time when books were so costly and time-intensive to create that only a very select few have them, and now look at them lining your world) and perhaps come in as many variations or more than your books, so that they can take on characters more in line with your aesthetic

which means

Everything you’ve ever written or recorded or sung or played or read or heard or seen can be preserved forever.

What if, instead of an iPhone, you were carrying around a battered paperback, but inside was a spatially-consistent memory of a variety of texts, etc., and it could also access the vast stores of the internet? But it looked, felt, and smelled exactly like a book? Could take the same beatings, the same care, the same love?

…

Yeah, the “Cloud” is temporary, because it’s brand new. But it’s already many orders of magnitude more durable than any single book on your shelf. My laptop is fragile, but I keep all my important stuff in a Dropbox folder that automatically syncs to so-called “cloud” space, which is actually called Amazon S3 and isn’t a cloud or anything nebulous at all, it’s just a multiply-redundant networked system of hard disks that is trying its damnedest to never lose anything again, and trying to do so for as many people as it can. To overcome the very scary-temporary thing you’re worried about. And it’s not the only system being built for that purpose.

No, I don’t fully trust it, either. But I trust it so much more than I trust the notebook that I can leave in a restaurant seat or can fall out of my bag or whatever else and then be gone forever.

… And, yes, I actually still like my notebook better than I like my computer. But that’s a temporary condition. Computers are already trying to come down out of the realm of holy relics and into the realm of use-and-abusable daily objects.

And if you’d been writing in a notebook, you wouldn’t have gotten responses from thecamcorder, flannelowl, and I wouldn’t have known about the conversation, and I wouldn’t have been able to give my input.

Which maybe makes you love the notebook more? :)

A few more scattered points, re-reading, and I’m sorry for writing so much (I have a lot of information I want to trasmit and preserve and converse about): A book is a machine substituting for reality. Or creating a reality. Computers are becoming portable. Some might suggest that “uncluttering” will lead to clearer thinking, though mostly the movement you describe leads to more consumer frenzy. You’re typing about being grumbly about technology into (it looks like from this end, anyway) the very thing you’re grumbly about. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s already part of you. Hating it leads to self-loathing; figuring out how it fits best into your life and how it needs to grow is a positive path. The Kindle: puh. Just one step. This is the 1970s of digital books; i.e., as silly or unfathomable as personal computers seemed to most people then, so do digital books right now.

Oh! and the society/trace thing! I almost forgot! What if we generate limitless power and develop a system of so much redundancy (in terms of infrastructure, not content or thought (though probably that, too)) that the content is never lost… so that even if we all die, a “future civilization” wouldn’t have to dig up and piece together the relics, they could just approach one of the many devices and begin to speak with it, and it would figure out their language and tell it everything about us from ever? That’s really not that ridiculous an idea, given another hundred years.

Convenience! People don’t go out for the same things in the same ways as they did twenty years ago, but in 1982 we didn’t gather in the same ways “we” did in the 1500s. Or even in 1950. The topology of culture is constantly shifting, and in recent decades it’s shifted to an almost-entirely-commercial landscape. If I want to meet a friend, we figure out which business we’re going to meet at. Which shop. If people don’t have to go to 200 different shops in a single town to get the things they need, maybe that space can be used for something else.

Every example you give of “going out” is about commercial activity, and so is much of the internet’s focus. But that’s just a small fraction of human interest, and a small fraction of what the internet does. It does raise really interesting questions about why humans will congregate when it’s not “downtown where all the stores are,” and maybe that sort of thing won’t really ever go away. But I think the more exciting question isn’t, “What good is all this weird stuff,” but, “What new structures — social, communal, commercial, etc. —  does this let us create?”

Again, yes, current iPod breaks after a few years. Future music-container does not break as easily (maybe). Is it any more palatable if you were buying a thing that you knew would be with you for life, or that at least the data would without question survive transitions across multiple devices?

It’s the internet people who are doing things to avoid being susceptible to dam-bursting. Amazon S3. Google Energy. Dropbox. The Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Et cetera!!!

Meanwhile those who are too set in their ways to pursue new lines of thought are talking about how we can keep living off of petroleum for a few more decades, then burn all of the natural gas for another hundred, after which they don’t have to worry about it anymore.

If you are really a “survivalist,” if you really want to survive whatever shit is likely coming from carbon saturation or whatever else, you are absolutely going to need next-generation technology, the stuff that will build your weather-proof floating tents and keep you connected with the other islands or whatever. I don’t mean to be glib, there. Rather, I am glib but I shouldn’t be. The ability to finally get off of fossil fuels (to continue to reference the weather, as it’s a very pertinent but certainly not the only example) isn’t going to come from sticking to your guns; it’s going to come from as-yet-undeveloped (or currently-in-development) thought processes and equipment.

And, believe it or not, the fact that so many people use iPhones &cet is actually a really big point in favor of even better tech being developed in the broader scheme. The reason batteries are anywhere near effective enough in 2010 to power a car, when they weren’t in the 1970s when that idea first came around, is… why do you think? What happened in the last 40 years that has increasingly required better and longer-lasting portable power supplies?

The line of technology that started with huge-ass room-filling computers and has (in one branch) culminated in the iPhone sitting uncomfortably in millions of butt-pockets. The iPhone that does thousands of times what that power-and-resource-and-space-hungry mainframe was able to do in the middle of the last century.

“iPhone” here being the iconic and relevant-to-discussion representation of all modern, portable, electronic, networked devices.

The big point: your electronic stuff is temporary, but you also are electricity. And there are very good reasons to think that before long, your electronic, networked media will far outlive you. And will become as beautiful as our books. Or that books still have a place, but the other stuff does, too. And there are a lot more things to branch from all of this, but that’s more than enough from me for now, and I hope I haven’t stonewalled discussion with my huge wall of text.

What do you think?