Germbulb

germbulb

Lightbulb filled with luciferin-producing, genetically engineered bugs.

It seems like years now (well it IS years) since Craig Venter did his TED talk about creating microbes that were going to solve the… everything-problem, and to be fair, earlier this year he did manage to boot up a completely artificial living organism. Still… I can remember Alvin Toffler going on about the genetics revolution back in the 80s – this has got to be the most slowly encroaching revolution ever.

An Are-We-There-Yet tech, if ever I saw one. A bit like flat-screen TVs. They took about 20 years to turn up as well.

More more, faster faster. I am now so addicted to coffee that I feel like having another one before I’ve even finished the first one… but then I have a fairly addictive personality. And a will of iron, which means I get to give stuff up a lot. Things I have been addicted to so far (now vanquished apart from 3 and 6), in decreasing order of damage:

1) a beautiful blue-eyed girl
2) crack
3) alcohol
4) an alcohol-nicotene cross-addiction
5) computer games
6) caffeine

and somewhere in that list… slotting in somewhere is The Internet – or is that just information? A non-stop flow of information. I am so burned-out I can hardly function. I’m trying to do about 5 freelance jobs at the same time now, as well as personal projects. I can’t concentrate on anything for more than about 10 minutes… can’t read books any more – anything longer than a paragraph has me thinking “whatever; next”. I can’t sleep without having a podcast going on in the background. All the things that used to be a normal part of life, I now have to todo-list, schedule, tear myself away from the web to do.

So when I saw this… “Screens of the Future

In which some poor bastard wakes up and plugs in straight away (with an iPhone that has “centre-fold-mode” (fap fap)) and some poor woman not even being left in peace to brush her teeth without multi-web-tasking… it just made me feel physically tired. Weak.

So I thought I’d tell the internet about it. And then I’ll tell twitter than I’ve told the internet. Twitter will automatically tell facebook and friendfeed… and so into google.

To bear witness etc. Those that can’t do, echo.


2 Comments » for Germbulb
  1. Nick, You. Are. Hilarious. Full stop.

  2. Zupan says:

    i thoroughly enjoy the lack of device branding. but, it was almost unsettling.