Disperate Visions

FULL PRINTED from nueve ojos on Vimeo.

(via Ponoko (and whoever thought that making a link called “latest” was a good idea is flat, custard-pie-in-the-face wrong))

Neat though innit. In a nutshell.

There is alas an alternative vision:

Whassat? I hear you say. Laptop with some bits?

Not entirely – that’s the future, where everything is 1/2 fucked.

The fan in my main laptop has broken and it will no longer boot… so… that picture is an old machine I had lying around, with the main machine’s hard-drive connected via USB and sitting in an antistatic bag, glowing eerily. If you look closer you’ll notice that the trackpad has gone… hence the mouse… and the power plug is actually hand-molded out of polymorph because the off-the-shelf ones are deliberately unreliable and proprietary so you have to keep buying new ones.

The warm pink tone comes from a 1000 watt arc-lamp bounced off the ceiling.

In addition to this, the sound doesn’t go and the camera-card slot doesn’t work, so there needs to be a third machine to read cards and to provide music (or just white-noise) via headphones… which are an absolutely necessity for drowning out other people. Without them you’d go insane.

On top of that… my main camera (canon t2i) is now a bit fucked – the screen at the back is cracked and the card-holder no longer clicks properly so it can only read certain cards… the music laptop has been fucked for about a month, but I managed to fix it by pulling the ram out and putting it back… and my main 1TB eSata backup drive has simply stopped without offering any clues as to why.

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So there it is. A future where everything is made out of the cheapest stuff possible, so is a bit shit and breaks after a month. A future where everything is so fucking complicated than nothing can be fixed… everything is cobbled together from the parts that still work.

Makes this highly admirable thing… The Cult of Less… a bit of a non-starter, because you need to have lots of backup stuff, or else you’re fucked. And I truly want to live with less… I’m a techno-gypsey. I live from one wifi-connection to the next… portability is a virtue… but vital infrastructure needs backup because… well it’s vital. My main machine won’t be repaired for at least 6 days… 6 days without a laptop is enough for me to go out of business… or at least seriously damage it. Canon will take over a month to repair my camera – so I need to get a backup before I send it off to them.

Everything’s falling apart and we can’t afford to fix it, so we need to hoard junk.

The ruin of the unsustainable… isn’t our new frontier, it’s… what we have left. Toxic waste is in the blood.

Further out though… see that blue hard-drive in a bag? Every time I get a new laptop, that’s what happens to the old machine. It winds up with its brain taken out… sitting next to the new machines, glowing eerily… kindof obsolete, but there might still be some useful information on it.

As I am now, so you shall be… when I finally go, my brain will wind up in a jar, glowing eerily, plugged into the next machine… kindof obsolete, but there might still be some useful information on it.