I sketch this essay while flying along in the dark at 250+ km/hour in one of the spacious new saloon cars on the last Friday evening ICE (InterCity Express) train between Hamburg and Berlin. For the whole two hour trip, it is empty save for one other human sitting a couple rows ahead of me. I could have quit writing and gone forward to talk with him instead, but didn’t. This makes my humanity perhaps a bit suspect as I recall a phrase spoken to me by an Other in a similar situation in Norway once, “Come, we must not be as two animals, we must speak!” Instead I sit in front of a small colored screen and add words to an abstracted but ordered dataspace. Communications with a distant Other, you, while ignoring the one who was proximal. I write, inspired by comments Christian made earlier in the day. He suggested that I write more anecdotally about what I am doing, perhaps to make them easier to comprehend, more interesting, or simply as an exercise to clarify my own thoughts. This particular essay will not address the psychological background of the subject material. Throughout, I will suggest the idea that there is much more to write about — there always is, isn’t there? To step out of socially-engaged life and to focus attentions on a screen brings up a fundamental conflict between having a life, and having a life mediated by the screen, by the text. That’s what I am doing here in dynamic, active, stimulating Berlin for the next few months. To have a life mediated by the screen: to write, to be a writer. Here goes.
I find myself puttering around Christian and Steffi’s new kitchen. Looking for anything that might need tidying up: evaluating the situation to see how I might increase the level of perceived order before my departure. I do this evaluation often. It is not necessarily a conscious process, more a meditative act preparing to productively occupy a space for a certain time. As a nomad, these departures are more frequent and of more contained intensity than most folks experience. My internal order mandate spans the full spatial distribution of my nomadic life.
Flash back to a rambling 1940s-era home in the village of Bedford, located in the center of affluent Westchester County, about an hour north of New York City by train. The area is home to presidents, presidential hopefuls, and other such-like folks among the horse farms, golf courses, reservoirs, and forested chunks of very expensive real estate, all delineated by stone fences of greater or lesser age as evidenced by their relative disorder. It is around the Christmas holidays. I am with old friends. Part of the time they are at home, and part they are away to Costa Rica for some days of tropical winter-relief. During that interlude, I am house-sitter, dog-sitter, mail-getter, chicken and rooster-sitter, and raccoon fighter — all those roles in addition to one more agreed upon somewhere in the deep history of the friendship — that of being the emptier of the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets of any left-overs and extraneous edibles. It’s a tough and challenging role to play. But this story isn’t about consuming food per se, it’s about media. One could say consuming media, but media can’t sustain life any more than dollar bills can (as the poster of the ‘noble savage’ in my sublet flat in Berlin proclaims heavily, “Only after the last fish is caught, only then will you find that money cannot be eaten”). Despite that warning, it is about organizing media for consumption, digital media. That’s the socially abstracted stuff we are suspended in, floating in, drowning in these days — deep in the accelerating technological rush of the aging New Millineum. We are no longer in the same boat, we are no longer in boats at all, we are simply floating in an abstract space, a dataspace. Youngsters appear like Jesus, walking upright on water — but that’s just an illusion created with Photoshop. This digital flood arrives at the gates of our sensual being from every Cartesian direction and from directions that poor Descartes never imagined, a drenching plasma susserating every part of the body electric with legions of charged and glittering particles.
How to cope with this disorienting immersion? A GPS unit is of no help at all, actually it just makes the world even more dependent on someone else’s dataspace, no thanks!. I promise no particular answers here, rather only an approach, perhaps, a simple meditation on one possible orbit to point life along, and with some luck, to avoid any black holes on the way. In mind at least, the terrain of the fondly recalled and wished-for analog dry land is still visible on the event horizon. But as age and experience advances with the inevitable arrow of time projecting straight ahead from between screen-reflecting eyes, that land seems to morph into clusters of shaded polygons. Illusion becomes the only reality. Perhaps ancient principles and wisdom will ground me, just as eating the real stuff in the fridge will keep my belly full, perhaps not.
So, back to principles. Bringing order? Is this an insult to my hosts? Is their system, their situation, not ordered? Well, in the wide view, it is and it isn’t. From a thermodynamic point-of-view, order is a time-dependent state of a system that is subject to the ravages of entropy immediately when energy stops being applied to or drawn into the system. In other words, the energy content of a system is directly related to the order of that system. Whatever their system is, it increases its state of disorder naturally — when they stop putting energy into their system, it will tend to disorder. This concept of entropy is not a scale-dependent quality — at any spatial and temporal scale, disorder creeps into a system. I’m not suggesting that they had stopped putting energy into it, but they did decide to go on holiday for ten days, didn’t they?
For me, bringing order is simply an approach when entering a situation: engaging the situation with my available bank of life-energy and departing with the hope that I left a higher degree of order than when I arrived. It is in reaction to the simple and brute recognition of the entropic nature of the universe. It’s about spending some life-time in and on the situation — life-time which is, in the end, a quantifiable amount of life-energy. Think, it takes energy to maintain the order of a body. It takes a certain amount of energy to maintain it for a certain amount of time. The profound fact that life-time is limited makes this process of spending it wisely all the more complex! It is about converting a portion of ones available energy into applying some kind of order in the situation. Part of this available energy is in the refrigerator. Part of it is in the air we breathe, actually every single thing we look at, hear, eat, breathe, feel, smell, all these things are bringing energy into our body-system. Think about that next time you ‘meditate’ on the tabloid covers while standing the express checkout line with the three tubes of Pringles.
But spending energy on a situation, putting energy into a situation is what most people do, isn’t it? Hard to say. It would appear that some decrease the energy (“What’s for dinner, Honey?”), or disturb the energy (“Oh, sorry to bother you, but is that my child smoking a bong in your livingroom?”), or absorb the energy of a situation (“blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, … huh?”). Some create disorder, chaos, some construct possibilities for order to evolve (“Clean up your room!”). Something like that. Life provides a rich source of examples that illlustrate this process, but to put it briefly, the flows of energy depend on the visitor, the locals, and the situation.
Order is most easily evidenced in the arrangement of things, although this approach goes against a truly contemporary world-view hinted at previously which sees everything as a manifestation of energy — you know, that stuff the physicists and yoga instructors like to talk about. They say things aren’t things at all, but are manifestations of a universal energy field (well, sometimes Dark Energy, sometimes the regular stuff). And order is not a static condition but a transitory state — just think of the kitchen you just cleaned. But it’s easier to start the discussion by getting wet with our feet in the old mechanistic puddle that Newton dug to place that fallen apple in. Let’s consider things. Of course, it’s good to note that things are made of matter and matter comes in a variety of forms like solid, liquid, gas, and plasma, the big differences being how much energy each form has. So, yeah things are energy, things have energy, things can even take energy at the same time that can be ordered or chaotic. So many things to remember!
Being mobile myself, a nomad, things like books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, vinyl (albums, right? those things that DJ’s used to carry around to club gigs and wedding receptions in heavy plastic milk crates) — not to mention their various sleeves, cases, and containers are a drag on mobility. This is the effect of gravity acting on the Self, bringing that sometime ebullient self closer to the center of the earth, accompanied by lower back pain. Exchanging those containers and substrates for a more efficient form, namely a single ever-shrinking hard-drive, seems to be one small, desperate reaction to the ever-increasing amount of stuff and data we are suspended in these days. An ethereal and thus effortlessly portable dataspace instead of piles of heavy stuff. Granted, it’s no life-raft — it’s more like having a large and heavy-but-still-portable floating bath-tub to dip that body electric into when the complicated analog world becomes too much. Never mind the cables, the transformers, and the other accoutrements that go with that only partially ethereal hard drive — like the 10 kilo laptop to drive it with, talk about an anchor! Oi, my back is killing me!
Okay, time to quit with theory and get down to action on the ground: this story is about physical objects in a specific location and what I did with them. There in Bedford, B_ and A_, along with the three kids, Z_ (almost 16), S_ (13 and my godson), and M_ (11), have acquired many CDs over the years. How long have CDs been around now, 25 years? I don’t think they were among the extremely early adopters when the CD was first introduced in 1982, instead, I imagine they probably started like most folks in the late 1980’s or so. B_ had, has, as well, a lot of tapes like I still do: they over-lapped the acquiring of CDs, and were used often for making those illegal CD mixes for other folks. But that’s another story. Most of their CDs are stored in a buffet unit in the living room along with those old tapes and the newish hybrid digital/analog sound system, next to the home theater unit.
The day before they leave on holiday, Z_ and I happen to end up talking about music and the fact that he doesn’t really know what music is on the CDs in the drawers in the buffet, so this gets me thinking about the collection of CDs. Okay, I’ll be hanging out at the house alone all during the Christmas holidays. hmmmm. Something to do. hmmmm. I should be writing, or at least, somehow, figuring out how to make money, eh, but that’s yet another story.
I drive them to the airport for the early morning flight to Costa Rica the next day. When I get back to the house, I set up my PowerBook on the kitchen bar where there is plenty of room for a couple extra hard drives, and easy access to the refrigerator. S’s computer, a new iMac is in his room down the long hall past the living room and den. I don’t have his user ID to login, but fortunately he has set the machine to automatically start-up every morning at 07:30. This machine becomes an important element in the unfolding process.
I continue thinking about the collection of data. Imposing order on it. And facilitating access to it, converting it to information. Because the whole family has migrated to computers and subsequently to iPods, the CD collection is gathering dust except for some occasional use in the cars. There were efforts to digitize a CD here or there, but the vast majority of the disks have not been ripped. The collection in the buffet is physically a bit chaotic as well — empty CD cases, CDs without cases, home-made CDs, broken cases, loose bits of CD cover and insert material, special cases of metal, cardboard, and so on. I start to make an overview of the bulk of the collection in the three large drawers. Thirty-eight standard CD cases per row. Around 14 rows. Do the math. Plus around one hundred home-burned CD compilations without cases. These I can’t do much with except collect them in one place. All the rest, the commercial CDs, I will impose a new order upon.
An important initial task is to decide what format to rip the CD into. I look at some of the ripped music on S’s and Z’s machines, some are in AAC format, some in mp3. Hmmmm. Which to use? It is a Mac house-hold, but what about cross-platform compatibility? I don’t take the time to re-research format information, use my existing knowledge-base instead. Go for 256 kps 44 khz-sampled mp3 for above above-average quality, reasonable size (around a 6:1 reduction in data size), and widest compatibility. I’ll be using iTunes as the tool for the encoding. There are options, as for any technological process, but the more optimized the option, the more life-energy or cash it takes. Think: Department of Defense budgets.
Ripping, encoding, digitizing — whatever it might be called — is a reductive process of changing the state and relations of chunks of digital data. One format to another. Reductive in the sense that taking a CD from its native (aiff) format to, say, the mp3 format popularized by online file-sharing, you are actually throwing data away, reducing the amount of information that you started with. Of course it is mainly an issue of how much can you throw away before you affect the sound, but this a moot issue as the original CD is already a digital artifact that is made the sampling the original analog sound every few milliseconds and turning that sound into a number. I won’t go into details on that. But everything between those little numbered samples is thrown away. Hence, reductive and mathematically ordered. Less than what you started with.
iTunes has a number of preference tweaks that will ease the intensity of the process. Things like setting the program to automatically begin encoding a CD after insertion. This after the CD is automatically assigned the proper metadata — track, album, genre, and artist information — from the Compact Disk DataBase (CDDB) online. CDDB is a commercial social-networking resource which matches hard-encoded ID tags from the majority of commercially available CDs to its database of this user-entered metadata. iTunes ‘sticks’ this metadata to the encoded files, how clever. So, pop a CD into the drive, iTunes revs up, finds and applies the CDDB information, and begins the encoding process. A typical CD takes between six and eight minutes to fully encode, somewhere between five and fifteen times the regular live play-time speed. Enough time to make one Pop-Tart. I start dividing up the main collection in the living room — intact CDs with intact cases are the primary pile, then comes intact CDs with broken cases, then odd-sized cases, then CDs without cases, then home-burned CDs, then empty cases. I carry stacks of about 30 from the first pile into the kitchen and about the same into S’s room. I open the cases, remove the CD and make parallel stacks of empty cases and the CDs that go in them. I begin feeding the computers and myself. To be truthful, I do make some effort to work-out in the basement gym and do some yoga in the den, but these are very much random attempts framed by breaks to change CDs.
A variety of glitches begin to pop up. The first and most annoying one appears as I rip a Martha Stewart Christmas album. The CD player begins to make a repetitive “cha-chunking” sound, the iTunes interface shows the song being ripped, but no progress is made. This apparently indicates a damaged disk, dirty, scratched, whatever — the necessary dataflow is interrupted to the degree that it stops the encoding process. Pressing a cancel “X” in the progress window does stop the process, but only after a minute or three of more cha-chunking stasis. Then I have to eject the CD which takes another painfully slow couple of minutes. This on S’s computer. On my computer, for whatever reasons, I have to force quit iTunes and sometimes ever re-start the computer with the mouse button down to get the CD out of the drive. This resets the tweaked iTunes settings to some default state. Incredibly annoying and it slows down the process to a infuriating crawl. Fortunately it does not happen too often. Sorry Martha, because of bad treatment, you are excluded from the family dataspace.
I become an automaton. I could have moved S’s machine into the kitchen, to be sure, but didn’t, thinking that if I’m going to do this I’ll also need some movement to offset the static grind of screen-watching. Walking briskly between the two machines, prepping stacks of CDs, of cases, closing finished CDs in the correct cases, checking on arrested progress, and continually feeding CDs into the machines. I do this for a full day, 15 or more hours. I realize after the first day, as I continue to organize and tweak the process and the collection in the drawers, that the job will be more intensive than I had initially imagined. Day two. Up early. Start right away before putting water on to boil. Oh yeah, as I do a quick calculation, I know my PowerBook and two external hard drives will not have the capacity to store the entire collection which I estimate will be around 50 gigabytes of data. I run my PowerBook near to its capacity of 78 Gb most of the time — full of active visual-sonic projects and a highly organized and prodigious archive including a more-or-less continuous 14-year archive of all sent and received email among other jetsam. I can rip about 20 CDs on my machine before I have to empty it onto one of the external drives, I can do this several times, then I have to take that drive to S’s machine and dump the data in the main directory that I have established on his machine — named “House Musik.” His machine is new, so there is plenty of room — at least 200 Gb free. I have to be careful when doing this because if I have ripped two different albums by the same artist, I can erase/write over one of them. I open the main directory in list view, with each artist directory open to show the individual album directories inside. Standardization of view, harmonization of structure, synchronization of content. A disorganized dataspace will hardly ever evolve into useful information and never into knowledge!
Well into the second day. The project has at least two more full days left. I do informal time-and-motion studies to make more accurate calculations. These are thrown off by the fact that I have chores to do around the house, and that sometimes I don’t always catch when a machine totally chokes on a CD for 30 minutes while I am making tea, eating Pop Tarts, checking on the chickens, chasing down the dogs, or talking on the phone. It gives me a rough idea that more life-time than less will be required to do this whole project. I start looking around to make sure there are no other CD stashes elsewhere in the house. When I end up checking the cars, I realize that’s where many of the CD-less cases have lost their contents to. Nice feeling, finding the prodigal sons, but this adds at least a half-day onto my estimates. I also notice that Z_ has a sizeable stack of CDs in his room that he had started to rip the night before they all left for Costa Rica. I have to figure out a strategy to include those in my master database without mixing them in. I’m a fan of the Apple GUI option to assign a color to directory icons. I start to do that. Previously I had colored a few directories that S_ already had in his own music database. Just in case anybody wonders where they went I color-code the files from the car CDs as well. The Rainbow Collection. All these renegade CDs are sorted for encoding on the buffet.
As the database begins to accrete, I have to tweak the metadata that are attached to individual song files by CDDB. There are the occasional mis-spellings from the online database and very occasionally totally wrong CD information comes up. I also fume the arbitrary use of the “Compilation” tag which sends many “Best Of” albums by a particular artist into the “Compilations” directory rather than into the artist’s directory. And, if the metadata for a particular CD shows up in all-caps, I have an internal hissy-fit. It’s like someone is shouting the track names at me. In the end I don’t have the time to spend with the full database to do all the tweaking necessary to bring it up to my personal standards, maybe at some future date.
I physically clean the drawers in the living room, and begin stacking the intact and ripped CDs into rows, mentally celebrating when I finish a row (of thirty-eight CDs, remember?). I fill one drawer, five rows, by sometime on the third day. In a another drawer I start rows for damaged CDs and CDs with damaged cases. The most frequent case damage is where one of the thin plastic hinge tongues on the top or bottom of the front cover are missing, so the cover separates from the back. I shuffle through intact cases without their contents and swap good lids to increase the number of CDs which are totally DONE. I contemplate going out and buying enough new cases, but decide that when the project is done, there will be little need to be moving the CDs around anyway, so I just leave them.
Day three continues into a drone of walking back and forth briskly between the rooms, checking every seven minutes or so, tweaking the process, optimizing my movements, figuring out any other processes that are necessary. I either forget about the Pop-Tarts or run out of them. I’m nervous for a while as I don’t have a full back up of the data on S’s machine. But decide the risk level is so low that the worry is useless. And it is useless anyway — either you have a back-up or you don’t. If you do have a triple-redundant military-style back-up system, you can relax a bit. If you don’t, well, the risk is there for catastrophic data loss, but there’s not much to be done about it. It happens, then you deal with it, sobbing all the way to the disk-recovery shop where they look you square in the eye and ask you “what’s the data worth?.” When you tell them “half a life-time,” they will ask for your approximate hourly wage.
The buffet in the living room also contains that audio tape collection along with the VHS tape and DVD collection. In between feeding computers, dogs, chickens, and myself, I apply some cursory order to those by media type, case sizes, and uniting cases with contents when necessary or possible. No digitizing, just a surficial tidying-up — anything else would side-track the main project, though the concept would essentially be the same.
Oh yeah, at some point in the midst of the process, I fast for two days. No more Pop-Tarts. This dooms the possibility of clearing out the fridge as well. It does raise my state of awareness a couple notches, however, enough to note the incongruity of consuming data and not food. My energy comes from the focused imposition of order, this from a deep well-spring in the embodied self. No need for food. Possibly a need for psychiatric help, though.
I don’t recall when I actually finish, well, I don’t finish, really, until many days later, long after I pick up the gang at Newark Airport the day before New Years. Up to that point I have not had access to the rest of the business network in the office, and wouldn’t have touched that anyway without checking in with B_. The CD data organization process which I mention on the ride home from the airport stimulates a later discussion about the digital workflow in B_’s office. I previously had several days of conversations with his assistant C_ about the impending office roll-over to digital — primarily the scanning of older chromes and negatives and the acquisition of a high-end Canon SLR for B_’s professional and personal photography work. Back at the house, I sketch up a visual mapping of the office computing situation and interview B_ as to what tasks and outcomes he wants/needs from the combined network of machines. One outcome of the discussion is a dire prediction of an ensuing tsunami in the dataspace and of the thousand-fold sacrifice of life-times and life-energy that will be necessary to maintain an optimized level of order — this time to ensure profitable access to it.
It is the dominant cultural way-of-going, this necessity of using life-energy to bring order to a dataspace. As a way of going, it is necessary to optimize the energy flow, or else it simply runs out. It is a drain on life-energy — going into a zone, mentally remembering where things are, where they are backed up, where they need to be collected, what kind of metadata they need to have assigned and how to assign it, how to optimize physical storage, and ultimately, how to efficiently retrieve particular data from the ever-increasing dataspaces that we are generating. With a current network of ten computers, six regular users, three web sites, and 9 external hard-drives totaling around ten terabytes of storage space, order is vitally necessary. After several conversations with B_, I embark on a full review of the network, the individual computers, and the dataspace situation. I’m telling this because this process leads me to find, aside from the business data, at least another 50 GB of music files mostly in A_s machine, some on Z_s. Not ordered, though. Okay, so I gather all that together while shuffling terabytes of data around the office during an additional six-day trip to that zone. Digital images this time. But that really is a complete other story.
All told, the House Musik directory ends up with around 100 Gb of organized and color-coded music data, that’s about 90 days of continuous shuffle play with no repeats, 18,000 songs — not sure exactly how many full albums of music there finally are. Some of the music is from the iTunes store which limits play-back access to machines ‘blessed’ by the person who bought the music. This is a small glitch, but can be overcome by the fact that a purchaser can bless several machines for play-back. The vast majority of the collection is from their CD collection. Now it’s all in one large directory duplicated in two places within their personal dataspace. The directory is about a third the size of my own music database which I unfortunately don’t have access to — that sits quietly encoded on a hard drive in a G4 tower in my uncle’s garage in Arizona. One immediate idea is the melding of those two databases — where a significant divergence of taste would probably have kicked up the total size to maybe half a terabyte. That’s about eleven months of continuous shuffle-play. Oh, wouldn’t that be fun! It would also be against the law, but that is, again, a complete other story. Digital Rights Management: most of the global dataspace is fenced off and the gate-keepers ask an exorbitant admission fee.
Meanwhile, actual network access to their 100 GB of music data is still a big issue. With ten computers distributed on a combined wifi and hard-wired network, some portable, some not, a deep question is how to efficiently cope with different people wanting to access different chunks of the music. A reasonable solution to the would be to create a centralized server, always idling, so that the ten or so machines around the house and office can tap in and play from a central database of music that everyone added to. The family is especially fond of making mixes for each other (remember the tapes and CDs?), so that the idea of shared playlists would allow each person to take away and share the mixes easily on their iPods. This is more complicated, though, for example, if traveling with a laptop, a playlist is useless without access to the original music files. This can theoretically be solved by having a dedicated server with a static IP address that one could tap into remotely. Or one can download individual files or directories of music from the main directory to their local machine. This poses the issue of keeping that master directory intact and the local machines synchronized with their playlists which is a real problem if the lists are made up of partly remote and partly local files. There are third-party devices that allow customizable network access to the a music dataspace within a local network as well as online. On the other hand, maybe it’s easier to bring a limited subset of the main music directory on an iPod instead. The absolute best solution is to listen to the messy and oh-so-analog local sounds where one is.
A major issue which I didn’t really address before I hit the nomadic road again was that of knowledge-bases. In the optimal case, I would have liked to share more of the principles of the process to my friends so that they could exercise a greater degree of control over their own dataspace. Although experts cannot know everything, they understand the principles of the processes involved and can confront problems with appropriate procedural methods of solution. In the general case, the typical user is almost completely subject to the whims of the so-called expert. Every instance where the individual increases their knowledge-base regarding the systems that maintain their dataspace, they are regaining an incremental degree of personal autonomy. Next time I visit, I do hope to find a full fridge and the opportunity to distribute important bits of my own hard-won knowledge-base. I do this in special recognition that imposing my own black-box system of order, as defined by my own interactions with the available technologies, simply further erodes their abilities to control their dataspace. By sharing a knowledge of the tools and processes, they are empowered to recover small bits of personal autonomy. Knowledge is power.
+ + +
Yet another reflection on the process, after making the mandatory triple-redundant back-up regime for B_’s business situation a reality, it is evident that data storage costs have declined to such a level that one doesn’t really need to re-encode CDs anymore. Technically I could have simply copied all the CDs in native aiff format to a one terabyte hard drive. Instead of taking up 100 Gb, it would have taken up maybe 8-900 Gb. However, the files would then be at the full resolution of the original analog-to-digital process itself, saving one further step of reductionist, lossy and alienating life among the drifting galaxies of data that we still find ourselves orbiting among. If only we could digitize everything and live in that world. It would be so much more organized, wouldn’t it? Well, only if there was a large enough flow of life-energy to keep it that way. Care to make a calculation on the life-energy drain of that system? Why not simply enjoy an analog, un-digitized, life more fully? Or am I sounding like a mid-Century-modern Luddite?
It all comes own to a question of energy. My friend’s lives are full and vital, and they have chosen not to put that limited resource of life-energy into organizing their media sources in this particular way. What of it? It is a choice. It’s about where you put your life-energy. I have met people whose material life, the life of their ‘things’ appeared to be in great disorder, yet out of that state arose profoundly ordered and energized objects or events. The presence of too much order is clearly evidence of a vain attempt to stave off the inevitable universal principle of change. Order versus change? It does not need to be necessarily a conflicted zone of mutual exclusivity. Allowing the degree of disorder that is required for auspicious change to proceed is a state-of-being to aspire to. Order in the auspicious place. Disorder in the auspicious place. I knew that my friends would probably never have the time to do what I did, given their active and busy lifestyle. I did it as a gift, putting my life-energy into something that I could do well for them, something that I had the knowledge-base and skill-set to undertake, something that would have a positive impact on their lives in some small way. It was, in the end, simply another exercise of bringing a different degree of order to a small corner of a situation: in this case, systematically containing the externalized social memory of songs once sung in that messy analog state. I have many tens of stories such as this one.
Where to next? Well, each new household brings its own dataspace challenges. Digitizing of old videos is something that small niche companies have filled for some years, while some of those old VHS tapes are actually composed of photographic slides shot in the 50, 60,s and 70s. Add that to the fact that everybody now has a digital camera. Want to save all those images? Media updating, data storage, backing-up. And it’s all reductive, it’s the “next best thing to being there” mentality, externalization of memory, and the energy required to maintain those exponentially expanding tsunamis of external memory. Life-times will be spent on maintaining this system until the electricity runs out. No more Pop-Tarts. And then one can use those external memory devices as door-stops to keep the broken screen door from banging whilst you sit on the porch telling your grandchildren about the days of the great data flood, from memory. Folks will have to eat the food from the fridge before it goes bad, too. After that, go out and rebuild one of those old things, those stone fences.
Thanks to B_, A_, Z_, S_, and M_ (The Bedford Homies) for their endless and inspiring hospitality and enduring friendship; to Stefan and Ellen, Evon and Victor for rescuing me from a darker fate and for simply being there; and to Christian, Steffi and Fritz for opening their home and arms to welcome me.
— John Hopkins, Berlin, Germany, 31 March 2008