The Grumpy Owl

Nobody owns anything.  It’s all just rented.  Things break, degrade, get sold off and chucked out.  Even the food we eat leaves through the back door. The one exception is the most ever changing of them all.  Money.  You can own money.

Until you use it to rent something.

That every item is a disposable item was once  a truth reserved for philosophers.  Though your items would certainly be consigned to dust and ash, it was most likely that they would do so after you died.  Your plough, fur coat or samurai sword was more durable than you.   Even books were leather bound and cars built to last.

These things were the legacy that you would leave your children.

As such, objects became a fetish.  People madly accumulated them at the same time as their quality decreased.  This decrease in quality led to a decrease in prices, which led to more accumulation.  And all of this led to a loss of the fetish.

After a while, we noticed we were only collecting cheap junk.

I was raised in one of the first iterations of the disposable culture.  When we bought something, we excepted it to last and found that it didn’t.  Throwing things out because they broke and planned obsolescence were routine.

It was a much decried development and, instead of making people grateful for the marvellous items they could briefly rent because of their cheap quality, it left most people feeling ripped off.  Having just bought an item, you wanted it to last.

Instead it just went quickly into the trash.

As a young man, I saw the forming of the next stage of disposability.  Things would still break but, when they did, there was a better version on the market.  Your walkman did not break only to replaced by another walkman of the same type.  It was replaced by a discman.

Nowhere was this development clearer than in computing.  In this weird realm, your computer would be obsolete before it even broke.  You’d spend a lot of money only to discover that there was now a cheaper, faster and better model than what you had just bought.  Believe it or not, this too left people feeling ripped off.  It made others into rapid adaptors.

The rapid adaptors weren’t trying to keep up with the Joneses but were surfing the wave of rapid technological process.  Driven by curiosity rather than status, these neophiles bought the first digital cameras, cell phones and Mp3 players.

They often did so before there was any sort of practical, societal architecture to support these devices and always before the items were necessities.  They bought in before owning the things would save them any money or bring them any status other than that of “geek.”  And they often chose wrong.  It didn’t matter.  They quickly moved on to the next thing.

I suspect they still are.

That being a geek is now considered a good thing just shows how successful they were.  I bet the prehistoric mammals got picked on a lot too.  But do you see a lot of dinosaurs hanging around these days?  Me neither.  Back then, however . . .

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Yet rapid adapting was never my approach.  My relationship to technology is like that of a shark to a cruise-ship.  I follow the ship and eat what’s been thrown overboard.  I only buy the new gadget when it’s the old gadget.  That is, when it gets cheap and old enough to lose any status symbolism.

Every day, there’s more being thrown overboard.

The complete disposability of our items is no longer an abstraction but a concrete part of our lives.  Just as money achieves permanence through malleability, our most recent and best technologies have rendered ownership itself obsolete.

Even odder is that while we expect to quickly replace our actual objects, we also try to record every moment of our lives.  Thoughts once forgotten, now sit on twitter.  Events that would once be unworthy of a picture are now documented from every single angle then posted.  And just as the disposable culture once cheapened our products, the culture of permanence is cheapening our lives.  We spend too much time recording our actions and not enough performing any.

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But it’s a young development.  The novelty will wear off and thing will change, just as they always do.  Perhaps all these tweets and photos will lead to a more meaningful life, where we judge ourselves against the whole span of our years, looking for more eternal ways of being because our past will be inescapable. One must now be forced to wonder, before getting a haircut, if they still want those pics out there in ten years.  Ten years ago, there might not have been any pics.

It sounds ridiculous but it wouldn’t surprise me.  The enshrinement of the disposable had some amazing and beneficial side effects.  In terms of items, we now only want to own the things that allow us to rent, dispose and rent again.

And we only want those devices to last until the better one is available.

Consider the Mp3 player:  This one little device has replaced whole CD collections.  Other than it, there are no objects to own.  You download a song, erase it, download another and so forth.  The device is fluid.

Some people, myself included, have amassed  rather large collections of music on the things, attributing the qualities of a physical object to the data, but this is a mistaken and obsolete way of thinking about it.  Should we lose the song, album or –as I once did— the whole library, it can be easily replaced.

But I can see why I attribute value to these worthless objects.  I am merely looking at the present through the goggles of the past.

When I was a lad, culture was disseminated in two ways:

The first was through the corporate channels.  Sticking with the example of music, these were the big stores, the radio stations, glossy magazines and the music videos.

The second was though the personal channels. These were the indie stores, mix-tapes, zines and the live shows.

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Back then, it was quite easy to divide things into mainstream and alternative.  If a corporation supplied you with the product, it was mainstream  If your friend made it for you, it was alternative.  Things were simple.

But not anymore.

Zines have become blogs and some of these blogs are more popular than magazines.  Some of them make magazines look like pillars of integrity.  The music industry is reeling, not because of piracy, but because people can easily hear music other than they proscribe.  And, after hearing it, why would they listen to their crap?  Lady Gaga and her ilk just aren’t very good.

Certainly not good enough to pay for.  Even the people who listen to that nonsense know that much.

And it’s all gotten easier.  Making a mixtape used to take hours and required access to a couple of machines as well as a music library, most of which would be cobbled together from other mixtapes.  A lot of quality was lost.

Making a zine took even longer.  It was no simple matter of writing things down and pressing “publish.”  Aside from the content you needed scissors, glue and access to a photocopier.  They looked, well, they looked quaint.

But you know what?  Back in the day, those things looked a hell of a lot better than Rolling Stone, Spin or any of that shit.  To my eye, they still do.

Now things can be done so quickly, so easily and look so damn good.  You don’t even require the trading of mixtapes to hear strange new music.

The point here is not some “the kids have it so easy today” bullshit.  Rather, it’s a reflection on why I still, foolishly, assign some value to owning things –because in my youth, it was what we did– and why assigning value to owning things is now foolish — because the impermanence of our items is no longer a bug but a feature.

And this is a good thing.  I’m happy the kids have it easier.  The wildest punk rock dreams of DIY media, free culture and a mobbing of the stage has succeeded better than any of us could have ever hoped.  It turns out that our old, anarchic ideas actually work.  We were right.  Corporate World was wrong.

I’m as surprised as anyone.

Well, maybe not as surprised at her.

Though we have tasted some freedom just long enough to see that it works, though the kids are lucky enough to feel that it’s always been this way, that people have always been able to participate in the media, buy and sell over eBay and Etsy while getting music and movies for free, it has not always been this way.

The taste of freedom we now have is mere aperitif.  We’re still in the enemies’ restaurant.  Without diligence we’ll lose every gain and then some.

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Freedom is not inherent in the internet.  It can be designed so that it’s as totalitarian, regimented and boring as any other.  If you don’t believe me, forget China and just go online through a Sony Playstation.  You’ll use their browser, see their store and find that a lot of what makes the internet so good is unavailable or as difficult to get to as making a mixtape once was.

This is what a DRM internet looks like.

It ain’t pretty.

When I see a device like the iPad, I get nervous.  On a device like that it will, no doubt, be easy to get to the iStore and use iProducts but what of you don’t want to use the Apple products or buy a book from the iBooks?  What if you want to install a peer to peer network and share music instead of buying it from Steve Jobs?

Just how easy do you think that will be?

The great thing about the internet is that it’s a genuinely bottom up organization.  It’s worthwhile to the degree that it’s bottom up.  It succeeds to the degree that it’s bottom up.  It’s no wonder that companies want to control the bottom.

After all, imposing order from the top has failed.

Like anyone, I’m hardly immune to the neat-o flashing gadgets and to the neat-o  things they can do.  I love them.  I want them in my life.  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.  But, from my vantage point as a garbage eating shark, it looks to me like The Good Cruise-Ship Tech, is getting off course.  The captain has some nasty intentions and the passengers are too drunk to notice.

But I know these waters.  They’re called Monopoly.  And here there be dragons.