Confessions of a techno-fetishist, part 2
The big beige box
This is a continuation of a prior post which you can read here
What the heck do I mean by fetish? I am not talking about marrying your 1971 Ford Falcon automobile (a true story from down under) and then having a grand old time on its leather upholstery (did that happen? Probably not…). I am speaking of the way these alluring microprocessed thingummyjiggiloos and engineered desire machines become objects of irrational commitments, emotional investment and substitutes for unconscious, unnameable and elusive desires.
Beige memory
Ever since I was a wee lad, you could say I have fetishized consumer electronics. There was something mystical about my dad's stamped steel and plastic chassis, containing its high-density interconnected PCBs, palladium and gold-laden conductors and connectors, cables, and the myriads of copper wires. It is also still unclear to me, if the sickly yellowish beige was due to my dad's indoor smoking, or if it was the natural hue of the PC chassis.
Nevertheless!
To my 1990s self?
This technological marvel might as well have been some kind of alchemical, or magical device…
From Wikimedia Commons
Take, for example, the Windows operating system, its function is to literally make manifest a variety of windows. Yes, they were only virtual windows, but to my childhood me, they represented portals to a myriad of alternate, extra-dimensional realms, ripe for exploration! Indeed, even to this day I could not tell you how these windows actually operate, the interaction between software and hardware, or how these bits and bytes are transformed - to then manifest in front of me via the cathode ray tube monstrosity of a monitor. When I read descriptions of the inner workings of a CRT, I would be hard-pressed to distinguish it from a world-building fragment in a cyberpunk or cheap Sci-Fi novel. Something about electron guns, beams, and phosphor screens?
This post is not about my dad's dusty old Intel 1990s Pentium office computer, but I had to illuminate my earliest memories of the machinic to create a through-line from my childhood to present day. In actuality, this series of essays was spurred to existence in part due to my recent acquisition of the Meta Quest 3 virtual reality (VR) headset. My dad's glorified Turing machine remains a vivid memory, as it now most likely lives out its days buried somewhere under Ghanaian earth in Agbogbloshie. It could possibly also have been picked apart by e-waste processors in the Guangdong Province in China. I'd like to imagine, that the chassis has been claimed by a queendom of Ghanaian ants, or utilized as an estate by a family of scarab beetles and their tiny white grub larvae.
E-landfill in Agbogbloshie
My virtuality
It was this new headset that made me ponder on my continuing fetishization of consumer electronics and technology in my adulthood. Every once in a while - once a year or so - I get the urge to splurge (despite increasingly debilitating financial conditions) on a new slab of silicon, in a vain attempt to reach somewhere beyond my present mental structures, to touch something transcendental. Alongside the immersive, virtual worlds provided by a virtual reality headset, my dusky Hifiman, the monolithic graphics card and the reflective black mirror of a brand new 4k TV, all promise increased resolutions, more lifelike visuals, or qualities or dimensions, that is sure to usher my gaming, home cinema or music listening experiences to new standards of immersion, and enthrallment.
But does this cycle ever end? It makes me picture Sisyphus pushing his proverbial high pixel count boulder in ad nauseam, now outfitted with Amazon Echo Frames augmented reality glasses and gold-plated earphones embedded with Swarovski crystals.
My main man Sisyphus [From Wikimedia Commons]
These techno-fetishist fixations are of course not genuine receptacles of transcendence.
High resolution rendering does not render my life in a higher resolution.
Planar magnetic headphones do not help me hear or listen to the frequencies of living that truly matter.
Virtual reality distracts me from the virtuality of myself, like the seed that contains its virtual structure, and shapes its future to, ultimately, become a tree
The virtual reality of VR is a simulated virtuality, but what is the virtual structure and potential of my seed/self and how can I know it in a simulation? What kind of tree can I become?
Comparatively, when taking a glance at social media, virtual potentiality becomes part of a simulated and mechanistic machine that rewards or exploits certain performances, appearances and behaviors, which, in turn, become curated as part of a greater, engineered whole. In this cyberspace of regulations and conducts, we walk a fine line between subsuming and cultivating our selves according to the decrees in power inside the castle walls built from algorithmic mortar and bricks of data, surrounded by moats of forgotten memes and discarded hot takes and opinions.
Lead-up to the silicon empire
It is when looking back retroactively at my childhood and the escapist alchemy that computers, gadgets and consoles provided for me, that a pattern can be identified. In a way, many of us are born - not with a silver spoon in our mouths - but with a smart phone or tablet in our hand, a game controller, or, perhaps in the future when the technology allows for cheaper manufacturing, augmented reality lenses in our eyes that provide an endless feed of YouTube Kids videos. These devices and gizmos free up the parent to do household chores, go to work or are used to console a crying baby. To illustrate my point, nowadays, more than 40% of children aged 0–5 years are using mobile devices. Is this good or bad, I am not equipped to say! Some research results do seem to indicate that early adoption of information technology can help with the development of language skills and digital literacy.
My point here is not to debate the problematic aspects of creating a quantified data spectre of children the minute they are born, that will be used for lifelong profiling and targeted advertising in the coming technofeudal era. The crux of the matter lies in the very way we become entrenched in the system of the self-reproducing techno-fetishist religion (or techno-social religion when concerning our increasingly early adoption of social media and mobile devices).
My ushering into this cathedral of machines and devices started early for me, as seen in the earlier story about my dad's big beige box. I then became an avid internet user from an early age, and a gamer to boot. I learned to alt+F4 and plug in a SCART cable before I learned how to tie my shoes.
I do not dislike games, I do not dislike consumer electronics nor technology for that matter. To me, video games can be incredible entertainment, recreation, and art as well. Technology, moreover, is also primarily about how it is used, and thus can be both good and bad depending on how we–as societies– grapple with it.
However,
I do want to interrogate the seemingly passive way many of us adopt this religion, what its potential problems are, and how design minimalism only aids in promoting the modern-day sacredness of these techno-talismans and totems. The next post will be a more incisive look at the non-neutrality of consumer electronics as commodities, the subtle but coercive way we are programmed to join in on the endless Sisyphean endeavor in this silicon empire where we are steered towards upgrading our hardware, and how minimalism cloaks this under a superficial veil of beautiful, albeit benign, symmetry.
Thanks for reading!