Lemon Tsupryk Q3 #1: Digital Black Box
Sitting on your desk, maybe, or in your pocket, within reach. Or better yet, it’s what you are using to read this blog post.
We are tethered to these bricks now, whether we like them or not; having one is a ticket of entry into a society where Google must be at our fingertips and we have to have access to all of our friends and our schoolwork and the entire world. We offload so much onto our bricks people have begun arguing that they’ve become an “extended mind” of sorts, extensions of our hands that store knowledge and memories.
Moreover, everything has an app now, gluing the bricks more securely to our palms. Restaurants, washing machines, speakers, lights. Bathroom passes. Grades. We’ve gained power over our surroundings in the form of insight, but this information breathes down our necks in return. I see this echoed again and again in online circles: that algorithmic social media feeds and apps designed by powerful people to keep you stuck, staring, have us trapped in an iron grip.
It comes with no surprise, then, that some have started taking steps back.
I am fascinated by old technology.
A while ago I dug up my dad’s old camcorder he hid somewhere in the garage, and dusted it off while he stood there scoffing at me. It’s old and clunky and its battery drains at the speed of sound but there’s something about the audible whirring of bits and bobs inside the thing that I am infatuated with. It’s the opposite of a void brick, where information floats in nebulous clouds somewhere out there. Instead, ribbons of it are carefully encased in cassettes; physical chunks of memory which themselves can be interacted with (you can rewind the tape by twisting a pencil in one of the spokes to not waste battery). It’s macroscopic. Owned completely. And if the camera were to break the cassettes would still be there, sitting on my shelf, ready to be played by another.
This physical ownership was an overlooked feature of many older forms of media: DVDs, vinyls, instant cameras, radios. People are turning back to older technology now for that reason, and a myriad of others. There have been reports by platforms like the New York Post and BBC asserting that more and more members of my generation (and millennials, too) have been “digitally disconnecting,” reaching back in time for analog media.
I’m far from being the only individual inexplicably drawn to technology that modernity has reduced to relic. It’s the feel of soft book pages; it’s the whirring of a cassette camcorder; it’s the shininess of well-kept disks. But, most crucially, it’s also the freedom analog media grants us from the powers of endless algorithms and streaming services that always whisper to us through our mandatory void bricks.
Image included is a drawing I made years ago.
Lemon, your style of writing is captivating to read. The way you described the addictive nature of a phone and all the ways it has taken over our lives without saying the word “phone” even once speaks to your abilities as a writer. It is such an important topic to acknowledge the immense reliance our generation has on phones so the explanation of “apps gluing the bricks more securely to our palms” is one that resonates deeply with me. It really is scary to think about how much of a hold technology has on us because of how much we have become forced to use technology in this era. Our phones hold almost all the information we need in our lives. I often think about how if I were forced to call someone outside of my parents without having my phone, I would not know a single other phone number. I have been making it a point this year to try to stay off my phone as much as possible so reading about phone usage with a metaphor like this has really solidified my desire to get away from my “flat brick void.”
ReplyDeleteIn terms of old machines, I also love discovering new old devices to play around with. My family has this old DS we used to play with when we were younger and I still love picking it up every once in a while to play Mario Kart or Cooking Mama. I also have a fascination for rotary phones—I absolutely love hearing the clicking of the numbers as they spin back to zero. I really love how unique the topic you chose for this blog post and this was, overall, a great read.
Hello Lemon. I was warned by your intricate writing style by Abraham and to my delight, he was correct! I really liked how you compared the transparent nature of modern technology to the promise that analog gave. Everything is easily accessible on a "brick" however, most of us do not know how it works, and like you mentioned, the techniques these mass corporations use to control us. Analog on the other hand, with its "macroscopic" parts and easily observed is something that people can trust in. Recently, there has been a lot of people going back to using vinyls for listening to music. Other than having them as a cool collection, what is the point of having one? Listening on Spotify is more or less the same, vinyls are significantly more expensive than well free, and switching songs is really annoying. However, after reading your blog it makes a lot more sense. It is freedom from the monotonous and controlling media, giving us the choice to rip our minds, just for a little while from the "mandatory void bricks." I hope whatever you were going through when drawing whatever that is you drew, has passed and you are doing well(just kidding).
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