While hunter gatherers of yesteryear would marvel at the collective amount of time we spend at exotic tasks such as sorting spam, deleting spyware and performing computer maintenance updates, what their primitive minds wouldn’t fully appreciate is just how much machines save us from mundane, repetitive everyday tasks.
We Have the Technology*
And we want to take it back. Or at least get a refund. Who invented machines that get clogged with spyware within 5 minutes of connecting to the internet anyway? At the very least, we’d like to get it fixed. Repairing technology is a disappearing artform however, dumped into the dustbin of history by manufacturers who prefer the economics of disposability and built-in obsolescence. Remember watchmakers? Shoemakers? VCR technicians? Odd to witness over the years, the slow vaporisation of these careers. With omnipresent disposables at hand, it’s always cheaper to buy a new one, than have the old one fixed. And a quick glance of your watch/computer/phone/handheld game device etc – can illustrate just how much time was saved, avoiding all those pesky repair-queues.
(* Involves 20th century concepts, career paths)
Cubicle Envy
Flash forward from the hunter gatherer days ( and you’d mistakenly hope we’d have improved the ratio of leisure time to ‘survival work’ with all today’s time-saving devices), and there can be found, covered in photocopier toner, dreary old Dilbert. Dilbert.com of course, lampoons the bumbling, bureaucratic ways lives can be navigated nowadays. Jokes about drowning in info_structures probably aren’t the best antidote for those doing the hard yards on the beige carpet, but there are plenty of other online comic distractions to blunt the productivity of your workplace. Actual Dilberts probably prefer comics like: www.comicslifestyle.com, http://blogs.iloha.net/francis or www.ucomics.com/doonesbury for their daily dose of online comicry. And http://drawn.ca is good for a regular eyeball rinse of illustrators spotlighted daily from the globe over. Woostercollective.com is another visual juggernaut of daily street-art snaps, always with something to surprise.
TeleCommuters?
Technofetishist Nicholas Negroponte of MIT in the States, launched in January a quest for a $100 laptop project, hoping to provide a liberating educational tool for children in developing countries ( http://laptop.media.mit.edu) . With Google, AMD, MIT and others on board the project has teeth and they claim the biggest challenge is in making the screen cheaply, which they hope to do with the MIT invented ‘electronic ink’ ( confuse yourself here www.eink.com ). They hope to have some 200 million of these computers built by the end of 2006, entirely focussing their distribution to children of the developing world. Think not, weary cynics, of another 200 million online consumers, of another 200 million cheap assed data entry clerks, but of the grinning kids.
Online Spanky**
Data clerk slaves a little sedate? Remix scientology with the leather bondage and kink scene a few times over, and welcome to the ‘Gorean’ way of life, where science fiction serves to ‘guide’ the lifestyle choices of practicing ‘Goreans’. Submissives feeling the need for some more disciplined slavery and devotion would be best advised to hurry along to www.goreanwhispers.com.
( **The Sydney artist formerly known as www.imperialslacks.com/wade )
jean poole
I’ll believe it when those laptops actually land in Cambodia. Sure they’ll make them. But when it comes to determining who is actually deserving of one, it may be tricky to actually distribute them.
Just like there’s a tremendous global economy of used clothes. What gets ‘donated’ to Goodwill or a church often ends up on sale. Similarly these laptops may resurface in unanticipated places.
Aye aye Jinja~!
That last line of mine was half sarcastic…. but nonetheless there are some pretty interesting if technocentric ideas relating to this $100 laptop – that it will have a hand crank to charge its battery, that the light from it will be the most significant light in many homes…
we’ll see of course how well it turns out…
it is at least an interesting (if yes, technocentric) initiative to redress some of the global imbalances – see their faq for ideas about how they plan to distribute them…
http://laptop.media.mit.edu/faq.html
hi-5s from melbourne