Back On Track, Sort Of...

Detail of J.M.W. Turner's "Rain, Steam, Speed" (1844), via ibiblio.org.

Due to the Grande Louvre's persistent fiddling with my eMac I am at least able now to sign in to Blogger using Netscape, but with Java and Flash disabled. Which means I can't see YouTube. But other of our Computer Buddhas think, too, that my operating system--from 2005--needs an upgrade. As Laurie Anderson said some time ago, technology has brought the arms race to our living rooms, with its big hard drives and massive televisions, and everybody--including me--wants to get the biggest and best and latest.

Sigh.

Well, as we say around here, it could always be worse. This is an early birthday present, which is fast approaching, January 3.

Yikes.

"Promises that technology will improve our future lives have been surrounded by the powerful drives of consumerism. There is an enormous pressure for people to get with the program, get up to speed, compete.

Buy! Buy! Buy more bandwidth, more storage, more memory, more speed and if you don't you'll be left behind in the dust with the rest of the digital homeless. So what began as a promise becomes in fact a kind of threat.

As technologies escalate and things get faster, a lot of people get caught up in what amounts to a sort of personal arms race, building up arsenals of equipment, and for what? So we have to keep getting more and more stuff endlessly: And we will never ever have enough. It's like we're in a race against speed itself." -- Laurie Anderson, from here.