references and thoughts about an essay I am writing
from http://www.glass-bead.org/article/simulated-subjects/?lang=enview
http://www.glass-bead.org/article/simulated-subjects/?lang=enview
"Contemporary artifacts project instead of representing. They project the future instead of documenting the past. Vilém Flusser already wrote about it in the ‘90s.4 It is part of a larger drive to preempt the future by analyzing data from the past and thus trying to preemptively make the future as similar to the past as possible. In fact, this is a sustained divination process of trying to guess the future from some past patterns; an act of conjuration. "
"Put simply: each small moment of convenience – be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song – requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. "
"You might date the beginning of this period to the advent of the Sony Walkman in 1979. With the Walkman we can see a subtle but fundamental shift in the ideology of convenience. If the first convenience revolution promised to make life and work easier for you, the second promised to make it easier to be you. The new technologies were catalysts of selfhood. They conferred efficiency on self-expression."
