Your most outdated gadget
Rob Walker asked some tech writers what their most outdated gadget was. Alexis Madrigal pretty much answers for me:
I think it’s the sound system in our car 2003 Volkswagen Golf TDI,” Madrigal says. “We have one of those magical devices that lets you play an iPod through the tape deck (how do those work?) — but it makes a horrible screeching noise when it gets hot.” That leaves the CD player and terrestrial radio: “We seem to rotate between the same three CDs we burned or borrowed some time ago, and the local NPR affiliate.”
Madrigal hastens to add that what he really wants is a stereo with “an aux-in so that I can play Rdio throughout the vehicle.” The problem? “I am scared of car audio guys,” he says. “I knew a lot of them in high school. They are a kind of gadgethead that just kind of freaks me out. I loathe the idea of going in there and having to explain why we have this old-ass tape deck, and then — because I don’t know any better — getting ripped off on a new stereo.
It’s either that or our cable box/DVR…that thing records about 20 minutes of HD programming and is 20 years old now. Really should trade it in for something made since Clinton left office. See also Robin Sloan’s dumbphone.
“One of the Scout’s cornerstone algorithms, for example, allows it to read blood pressure without the cuff that we’re all so used to seeing in doctor’s offices. In the future, Scanadu could discover an algorithm that connects, age, weight, blood pressure, and heart rate with some other variable—and then remotely trigger that relationship.”
—A Real-Life Tricorder Is Now Available For You To Buy And Scan Yourself | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation
“A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing: to score. No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito.”
—How to Make Wealth“There used to be all sorts of criticisms of the old "culture industries" like Hollywood and the top 40, which entertained us with stories or songs that always ended on an upbeat note, no matter how false. But at least the culture industries went to the bother of entertaining us. Their replacements don't even bother. They expect us to entertain each other, and pay a tax for it. Facebook or Google's YouTube are not the culture industries so much as the vulture industries, taking an information surcharge from us while we amuse each other, and selling us to advertisers. Like do-it-yourself commercial TV. These are all elements of what I call the "spectacle of disintegration". The old spectacle of television and radio papered the world with images of what the lovely soul of the commodity was supposed to look like. We were at least still free to daydream while we sat idly watching. But in the spectacle of disintegration, all that breaks apart. The big screen decays into so many little screens. Our leisure time is now to be spent producing information for the vulture industries of Google and co, in an unequal exchange of information. In exchange for the poll tax of personal data, we get to watch each other's cat videos, while Google becomes some new version of the state, presiding over all our bitty lives, master of all our data, in aggregate. Like any state, Google has its patriots. But there are also those who think this latest version of the spectacle offers some quirky avenues for having fun at its expense. Its time for a certain opacity, a certain glamour of obscurity. Not all the information we offer up has to be even remotely true.”
—Mackenzie Wark, Who dares to dodge Google’s information tax?
“The top 100 tech companies granted 19% of their total ownership to non-senior-executive employees. For the rest of corporate America, that number was 2%. In other words, when it came time to share rewards with ordinary employees, the Tech 100 were ten times more generous than low-tech firms.”
—i could reblog SBJ all day long
