i curse technology for creating itself* and nurturing my development as a human, for in the process i've become totally dependent!
we don't do anything ourselves any more. sure, it started with the little things: first we were using abacuses, and then we had to invent the calculator, and pretty soon it was supercomputers and smart bombs and satellite TV, and now people can't even get anywhere by reading maps any more, it's all GPS, a robot woman telling you exactly when to turn! we may not have personal robot slaves like ppl always imagined we would "in the future" but that's b/c everything we do and need is a robot of some kind, hell, we're robots! we're slaves to our own progress!
anyway, this is all just because i've been reading thru some old correspondences on my computer today. and in one of my emails i signed off with the phrase "everything is broken. we need to accept it and move on." now, this sounds so familiar, and i know i wrote it, but the use of the quotes in the email makes me think it might also be from something else, maybe a song or a movie, maybe a book? but the thing is, when i typed it into google, nothing came up except for a Bob Dylan song, which i haven't even heard before, and i don't even really listen to Dylan.
when i performed the same search in all my emails, nothing came up except for this one email (the same one that sent me searching in the first place). very confusing. i remember this being a significant phrase to me, mid-December 2007, right around my senior project fiasco. but i still can't quite place the source or the original context for this quote, and i love it so much. i just want to know if i wrote it, and was quoting myself in a different context, or if i owe someone else for these appropriate (and appropriated) words that are striking so true today. i need to know how my life is repeating itself, how the cycles are forming, why everything today feels like a deja vu but i can't quite figure out the difference between dreams and waking.
so, in my desperate search for the origin of this quote, i became overwhelmingly upset that i couldn't just build a large search engine for my life that would distill data from my brain, the brains of everyone around me, all my documents, notepads, every scrap piece of paper, my pockets, my desk drawers and my various lockers and lock-boxes, a machine that could read the indentions of my hand for notes now long washed away, that could recover erased phone messages and away messages and dry-erase board messages, that could mine all my memories and subconscious thoughts and all the music, movies, books and websites i've ever paid even the slightest bit of attention to, and present a nice list of all the relevant pieces pertaining to this one quote, from the entire whole of my existence.
wouldn't that be lovely?
but no. i guess humans aren't made that way. too bad we aren't. maybe in the future we will be. maybe right now, some super robot tech man is reading this and devising the next BIG THING of the century...
powers!
-stephanie
* "but Stephanie," you say, "things don't 'create' themselves, spontaneous generation is a fallacy!" oh-ho-ho, au contraire! what i'm suggesting is that "technology" was created by robots. that's right, the "people" who gave us the internet are really just trying to feed the cancer that is slowly taking over our lives... mwahahhahaa!!! (gives new meaning to "self-made man" doesn't it? ponder that for a while!)
Sunday, March 09, 2008
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3 comments:
You realy are right. As usual. Got out of programing puters intensively back in the 1980's only to discover the "farmers" in my life (what you become when yous taint froms the cityzzz (our cities are ocupied by zombies and vampires, AKA the living dead)) were like Briliant compared to computer geeks at doing math in thr head and while working on their feet.
That was just the tip of an iceburg.
Check out one my personal discoveries:
kludge SLANG
~ a software or hardware configuration that, while inelegant, inefficient, clumsy, or patched together, succeeds in solving a specific problem or performing a particular task. Random House Unabridged Dictionary
~ A system, especially a computer system, that is constituted of poorly matched elements or of elements originally intended for other applications; A clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
~ a system and especially a computer system made up of poorly matched components Merriam-Webster
WARNING use of this word, however in passing, may suport my music DL of the same nomenclature
Curiously, have you ever thought you might be what 2600 would call a hacker and not know it?
~ remaerdyaD
PS While atempting to write this coment, the folowing, atypical thing hapened: my text editor (I never use ur Normal word procesors - virus writers use text to, come to think of it...), a normaly compact thing-for-words not prone to probs, did one of its very rare failures and filed my breaks with code, turning my text file, which I write everything in, into half garbage in need of a litle Find/Replace text repair. After three failures of the program, which I write again is a very compact pr0g (about a 100kilobyte software program writen by one person) that I do all my writen work in on puter, and atempts to use openoffice to begin repairs, I repaird sucesfuly. I share the text with you (I have learned not to type into coment boxes directly... cant remember why exactly. Thank goldarnit computers do the remembring for me!!! (re: me facing a creek runing of sewage and no padle for my canoe)). The wonderful cycl of life continues... The good thing about it is that puters fuk us. So I ask, "why would I wish to be borkd while paying for software licenses to Latest Greatest titles while devising to DL the free title so popular with geeks - when I could simply interact between ether and technology instead (?)" It nevers ceases to amaze me as a computer scientist how the more I kludge and the les I feel comfortable using tech like some damn abreaction the more I feel both liberated from computers, more than anyone I have come across, while entertained by how well I CAN make them work. Sans comfortable liberation there is only frustration (lending to, honestly, prety farcical revolutionizing) and confusion (backed up with pety tedium).
Heh = come to think of it, cos I h8 on java, and popups, I have to redo coments to ur blog at least twice bfore blogergoogle servers acepts them... ((-: I am insane A-a... Catpchaing I wil go, a catpchaing I wil go, hiho the merygo....
Hey Stephanie,
(It's Kathee, I found your blog through a link on Brandon's blog.)
Isn't "Everything is broken," from one of Tommy's lectures? I think it's how he described post-modernism in his "History of Western Philosophy lecture." (It was a significant phrase for me in the dark of last winter, too.)
I feel that was about the search engine sometimes, but it's usually about something that I've lost in my room.
I hope you are doing well and miss seeing you around at class/meal-times.
Kathee
Katheeeeee!!!
thank you thank you thank you! you're right, it WAS from Tommy's class! wow, what a surprise to want to need something from Tommy...
anyway, thanks for stopping by and reminding me. your blog is pretty, i like the banner a lot. i'm glad you found me.
and i really miss you, too. i hope we can go to a concert together (and drag Brandon along) and maybe go for a bike ride? how are things?
hello!
-stephanie
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