The news of television, however, is what I particularly go for when I get a chance at the paper; for I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television - of that I am quite sure.
E.B. White - 'Removal', Harper's Magazine, July 1938
Showing posts with label there's an app for that. Show all posts
Showing posts with label there's an app for that. Show all posts
25.10.12
30.3.12
8.4.11
pattern recognition
When "you," the reader, are foiled in your pursuit of its story by the frailty of the text's physical corpus, the narrator imagines you hurling the book through a closed window, reducing the text's body to "photons, undulatory vibrations, polarized spectra." Not content with this pulverization, you throw it through the wall so that the text breaks up into "electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, elementary particles more and more minute." Still disgusted, in an act of ultimate dispersion, you send it through a computer line, causing the textual body to be "reduced to electronic impulses, into the flow of information." With the text "shaken by the redundancies and noises", you "let it be degraded into a swirling entropy." Yet the very story you seek can be envisioned as a pattern, for that night you sleep and "fight with dreams as with formless and meaningless life, seeking a pattern, a route that must surely be there, as when you begin to read a book and you don't yet know in which direction it will carry you."
Katherine Hayles - How We Became Posthuman
Katherine Hayles - How We Became Posthuman
9.8.09
and you will know me only now
by my IP address.
digital reincarnation renders one quite unrecognizable from fleshy whence-we-came, the speed of discard and re-habitation for purposes of mental outsourcing steal karmic hands from the universe-dealer now demoted to barkeep, thumb-twiddler what with reverence being ol' fashion n'all. 01101100 01100001 01110111 don't apply 'cept i makes it. we's all bandits, ain't none friends seein' how's all up for conquerin' tuh them there fellers with the dern biggest external hard drive.
showdown bang! mass hack-icide, none left alive.
identity clotheshorse-thief, who are your neighbors on such a scattered frontier? this dimension designs itself for immortality, your friends numbered voyeurs: shifty-eyed protectionist faux-lebrities with guns in their boots. remember turning the earth, the heat of the sun, the taste of another, pre-pixilation underived; obsolescence from a time before we all died and didn't notice.
the universe polishes another glass, pours a tumbler of what's passin' for drink nowadays, and sighs as the hazy RGB ghost sloshes the fermented ale of dead blogs down its gullett, 01100110011011110110000101101101 stuck to its .giff face, 56% loaded and moving jerkily. yet since all's free now, the ghost don' like to pay none and leaves only a virus on the bar, much to the instantaneous likes of the other wasteland patrons.
one too many times, thinks the universe. time, he thinks, reaching underneath the bar for the muslin-wrapped weight of the dull and ancient knife, swiftly gliding it across his throat and blinking the desolate blackness out, taking all but silence, compressing it all back into the smallest infinite mass, heavy beyond measure.
digital reincarnation renders one quite unrecognizable from fleshy whence-we-came, the speed of discard and re-habitation for purposes of mental outsourcing steal karmic hands from the universe-dealer now demoted to barkeep, thumb-twiddler what with reverence being ol' fashion n'all. 01101100 01100001 01110111 don't apply 'cept i makes it. we's all bandits, ain't none friends seein' how's all up for conquerin' tuh them there fellers with the dern biggest external hard drive.
showdown bang! mass hack-icide, none left alive.
identity clotheshorse-thief, who are your neighbors on such a scattered frontier? this dimension designs itself for immortality, your friends numbered voyeurs: shifty-eyed protectionist faux-lebrities with guns in their boots. remember turning the earth, the heat of the sun, the taste of another, pre-pixilation underived; obsolescence from a time before we all died and didn't notice.
the universe polishes another glass, pours a tumbler of what's passin' for drink nowadays, and sighs as the hazy RGB ghost sloshes the fermented ale of dead blogs down its gullett, 01100110011011110110000101101101 stuck to its .giff face, 56% loaded and moving jerkily. yet since all's free now, the ghost don' like to pay none and leaves only a virus on the bar, much to the instantaneous likes of the other wasteland patrons.
one too many times, thinks the universe. time, he thinks, reaching underneath the bar for the muslin-wrapped weight of the dull and ancient knife, swiftly gliding it across his throat and blinking the desolate blackness out, taking all but silence, compressing it all back into the smallest infinite mass, heavy beyond measure.
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