What Happened To Ted

Obsolete Technology

REMEMBERING MEDIUMS

Adding Memory: Andrei Codrescu (as read on radiolab)

The other day, a friend of mine was explaining how she had to move these pixels around her computer and had to add twenty megabytes of memory to handle the operation. I had the disquieting thought that all this memory she was adding had to come from somewhere. Maybe it was coming from me, because I couldn’t remember a thing that day.
And then it became blindingly obvious: all the memory that everybody keeps adding to their computers comes from people. Nobody can remember a damn thing. Every time somebody adds some memory to their machine, thousands of people forget everything they knew. Americans are singularly devoid of memory these days. We don’t remember where we came from, who raised us, when our wars occurred, or what happened last year, last month, or even last week. Schoolchildren remember practically nothing. I take the Greyhound bus every week, and I swear half the riders don’t know where they got on or where they are supposed to get off.
The explanation is simple: computer companies are stealing human memory to stuff their hard drives. Greyhound, I believe, has some kind of contract with IBM to steal the memory of everyone riding the bus. They are probably connected by a cable or something: every hundred miles, poof, another five hundred megabytes get sucked out of the passengers’ brains. The computers’ thirst for memory is bottomless: the more they suck, the more they need.
Eventually, we will all be walking around with a glazed look in our eyes, trying to figure out who it is we live with. Then we’ll forget our names and addresses, and we’ll just be milling around trying to remember them. The only thing visible about us will be these cables sticking out of our behinds, feeding the scraps of our memory to Computer Central somewhere in Oblivion, U.S.A. I think it’s time for all these memory-sucking companies to start some kind of system to feed and shelter us when we forget how to eat, walk, and sleep.

While cynical and presumably bias towards the concept of new technologies requiring more and more space, there is something to be said for Codrescu’s concept of moving our knowledge base from our own minds to that of databases accessible to all with the aide of a device. By outsourcing this memory we become less and less in control of the information. All we can do is access and read and consume.

Specialists of specialists narrow their area of inquiry to the point that they dare not stray out of their comfort zone, this narrow space is all they know. To toe the water they refer ‘online’, plugging into the network to reveal the quick answer to things they may not fully understand.

Buckminster Fuller talks about this in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. It detailed the era of a group of ultimate professionals known as the Great Pirates. Before times of cables and wires and internet clouds it was these few who could contact all parts of the globe to control the goings on. From them the hierarchical division of labour into narrow professions meant that only very few knew the bigger picture, to what ends could be seen. It appears that these Great Pirates are no more, or at least, they are hiding. The digital era has connected all points of the globe to black holes of information so that one can know everything, if only for a moment, if only given a few moments to search for it.
From Geneneration Y onwards, the Internet has always existed in some form, so there has been no time with out for them to discover. The collection of zeros and ones that we do not see and struggle to competent have always existed, like water, soil and air. It’s existence is not questioned in terms of influence on existing methods, much like those who grew up with television, radio, telephones, even language.
Living is something we do as human beings through these mediums. Our experiences are documented and translated for others to receive, understand and reply.