I always wonder what it means to be in control of one's world. Much of the technology we use is beyond what we can understand, let alone what we can construct ourselves. So it was with pleasure that I saw on Boing Boing that someone has constructed a Victrola from a kit.
Now this isn't the same as constructing a Victrola from scratch. But the kit itself provides a template for replication. This low-tech, low price (less than $60) kit can — fairly imperfectly — reproduce sound using plastic discs (CDs can be used.). The company that makes the kits, also sells an Edison recording device that records on plastic cups. Plastic disks and cups, while not easily reproducible, or produceable at home — I think you'd have to be able to create and mold plastic pellets to make such things — are household items.
So bear with me . . . I'm trying to work through the connection to some of the thoughts of Jerry Mander and how we can't make things by ourselves. Mander and others describe how we're dependent on a highly integrated economy complete with lawyers and a military industrial complex that although not intent on killing our young might be fairly neutral about the subject.
I wonder if we can we have computers that don't involve producing toxic waste and that don't consume thousands of gallons of water in the process.
In the "Edith Keeler Must Die" episode of Star Trek, Spock and Kirk time travel to Depression-era America, and Spock has to build a computer with materials on hand during the '30s. Would any of us be able to accomplish such a feat? Is there some easily handcraftable way of creating a semiconductor? And if there is how about an open-source productivity suite to go with it?
Would like to think that there isn't any malevolent intent in the makers of our computers, but I do believe that they benefit from our dependence. Acquired helplessness on the part of the consumers has always benefitted producers, the age-of-the-disposable-razor-blade came quickly on the heels of the end of the age-of-people-being-able-to-sharpen-their-own-blades.
All this aside, even more than GE and ADM, we rely on Providence, and should always spend some time remembering this.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Posted by mastr at November 25, 2004 10:30 AM