The Apple of My Arse
I’m having one of those days where I just can’t… focus on what’s emanating from my computer. Just as Nicholas Carr predicted (a writer for The Atlantic whom I quoted in my last blog), I’ve become one of those people who increasingly can’t be bothered to dig too deep or for too long for information or wisdom; as so many nugatory gobbets of arbitrary crap scroll down past our laptop-lit faces like code from the Matrix credits.
In an astounding coincidence - redolent of the worst amateur screenplays that use coincidence as a fallacious substitute for narrative complexity - less than a week later I have, myself, reached the apotheosis of this syndrome (who knew?). I cannot be remotely arsed to even look at anything that might fire up a brain cell. Better to let a few billion neurons die, unmourned, their light gradually extinguishing like strange fishy life forms ebbing into the inky blackness at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, then warm up the metaphorical electric pads and jump start them back to a miserable existence of being sucked up by the factory ships of Google or Yahoo.
I’m done. Full up. Not “sated” - which implies some sense of satisfaction and sustenance, that life has meaning, and even conforms to age-old generational concepts of investment and fulfillment - but simply bloated. Like a ravenous wolverine that has fallen through a dimensional space into a box of flesh and blood Hallmark card kittens, I have taken my fill, and can gorge no more.
I have tried to have an interesting idea - any idea - all morning to write about, scanning through the latest news and views on developments in the digital age (what did you think I was going to write about? Earthquakes? Wars? Those horrible-looking kids with harelips who could be operated on for $240?), but what’s the good when the entirety of the world can produce nothing worthy enough for to engage me with?
I have read (whilst swooning, abject, over my Wacom tablet like a Pre-Raphaelite poet) that some people are waiting on tenterhooks for what information will emanate from Steve Jobs at the World Wide Developer’s Conference as he introduces the second generation of iPhones. By the time you read this, the web media will have been all over his announcement, like lice on a perm, and you’ll already know whether this latest iteration of a mobile communication device comes with an improved 3G networking capability, thinner size and - hopefully - a pair of complimentary hovver boots, all for the cost of $199; but I just don’t care. I could care; but last year I saw a news item of a grinning moron cheerfully smashing his two-month old Razr (a perfectly good phone; that could do anything any sane person would have expected it to in terms of communicating with other sentient beings) underfoot for the news cameras as he neared the front of the lines that ran around the Mac store, and it just kind of… took the wind out of my sails, you know? Suddenly I was no longer interested in further researching my translucent casket with brushed titanium trim and reserving a plot in the Apple Acolyte Funeral Lawns (no Dells, beige monitors or unstable non-Unix systems allowed. Though Jews and Blacks not a problem.).
Maybe I could get up some interest if the poor fools who paid $599 for the prototype version of the iPhone a year ago decide to hang Mr. Jobs, like Mussolini from a lamppost, outside the Moscone Center in San Francisco and beat him with cracked Apple Cubes until he admits he has used them for years them as product-testers with more money than sense and a disproportionate empathy with lifestyle needs. The best I can do, in my abstracted, ennui-filled state, is to observe that, if dollars were hare-lipped child surgeries, the ‘person’ in the line had just recently spent the equivalent of 0.983 (recurring) hare-lipped child surgeries for something he soon after he ground under his heel, so he could buy a different version of a similar delivery device that would cost him 2.4598 (recurring) hare-lipped child surgeries which, now a year later, he will doubtless exchange for something that will cost him 0.829166666667 hare-lipped child surgeries.
Maybe I could care if I could summon up the energy to ponder how we got so addicted to incremental changes in information delivery systems that we somehow believe a recent upgrade is going to solve all our problems; somehow streamlining all that information so that we too can become shinier and more translucent, with faster brains, and can bark out a kaleidoscope of GPS-related cocktail-time anecdotes, accessed by stick-thin models in micro-dresses (like those chicks who don’t really exist outside of Vegas condo adverts), on touch screens imbedded in our six-pack tummies. But I can’t care, except for some vague realization that this vision that we will somehow meld with our devices is as absurd – in the other direction - as the Terminator boasting to his T-100 mates, as he holds a pomegranate to his metal ear, that he has the latest “organic accessory” and about how, one day, if Steve Jobs can marshall his scientists, they’re all gonna be able to shit fiber…
What else can I not be bothered to think about? How about fifteenth century peasants forming a line around the business of inventor Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany, in 1440, as he wheels out the first printing press. Those at the front, almost through his door, mug for the media (monks with parchment; less paparazzi than papalrazzi *) as they crush potatoes that they’d bought only last Harvest under their hessian Manolo Blahniks and scream: “The potato is finished as a tool of crude printing, long live the movable blocks of the printing press!”
Other upgrades followed fast and furious over the coming years, bringing down prices so steeply that Gutenberg was forced to issue Guilder credit vouchers to disgruntled merchants who’d paid so much for the prototype iterations. Gutenberg’s pioneering switch from water- to ink-based inks was to usher in a new era of clarity in set Latin type, but meant that the historical precursors to Lexmark and Brothers ended up clogging many a medieval garage sale; as attractive to your average pox-sufferer, looking for a second-hand poultice, as a 10 year-old ZIP drive without the power cable.
Gutenberg’s company, which previously held a tiny market share when faced with the might of the Bill Gates-like “oral history” megalith - in which stories were held in the dim recesses of the more alcoholic and voluble members of the community, accessed and repeated whenever the fire embers were dimming, and the party was breaking up, in an approximation of an Alt + Delete +Charm-the-Wench + F4 reboot – began to make some real incursions into the cobbled high streets when it started to print the killer peripheral: the Gutenberg Bible.
The Gutenberg Bible (“GB”) changed the face of society. Peasants could now own their personal word of God in 42-lines per page Vulgate Latin (36-lines per page in the later “GB 2.0”), accessed by a click wheel equivalent known as “turning a page” or “reading.” Some scholars have lamented the invention of (what became colloquially known as) the “iGod” as the beginning of the end for an integrated committed community; wherein people previously given to participating in group events – starving, tithing, expiring from the Black Death – were given permission to withdraw into a separate and sequestered world of begatting and begetting, of fatted calves slain and offspring slaughtered because it was a matter of deuterocanonical necessity. Other scholars have argued the opposite: that the creation of the GB was merely the print press equivalent of the latest Coldplay album, and that every society has the right to learn from its mistakes.
Regardless: as artisans wore the GB in customized sports armbands and perched, hundreds of feet up, raising the heavy beams of new cathedrals (an experience of the confluence between being in the temple of God, and simultaneously hearing the word of God, that can only be approximated in the present day by putting two Koyaanisqatsi CDs on separate machines and playing them a half-second out of synch whilst lighting up an emergency doobie), or quacks quoted from the GB to deny female peasants the right to a clitoris, there was no going back.
A few decades later, William Caxton imported a hybrid version of the printing press into England, and soon after it was game over for all those dot.com start-ups – Walloon.com, Flemish.net, EternalFrenchInsults, I-Am-Norwegian-And-Can-Emote-If-Bought-Enough-Drinks – that withered on the global vine in the face of a language so potent that, even today, the sight of a typeset “wanker” in Neville Brody cut-up still causes recently-discovered tribes to fall down in awe and make pilgrimages to the King’s Road. So what’s it all mean? I don’t know; I just got an RSS feed and I got distracted…
I’m sure there’s something profound going on: but I’ve lost the plot again. I don’t know what to tell you; connections these days are so fleeting, and so dependent on a double-click before you’re on to the next thing. I bet you could connect Britney’s knickers to Armenian genocide if you had half a mind and a copy of US Weekly…
I do know that the Chinese invented print text centuries earlier than the Europeans, in the Song Dynasty; and seeing as most of the children with hare-lips seem to be Asian (why is that?) maybe there’s some kind of payback coming: all those little kids whom we didn’t pay to get ‘fixed’ because we’re too busy buying phone after phone with our disposable income may, one day, have the last gimpy laugh on us as our brains sprout phone-radiation-related tumors.
Why… but… wouldn’t that make us: hare-brained?