omino code blog

In high school, in the latter half of the 1970′s, me and my geek gang used to quip that in the future, there would be two self-selected castes: Those who made television and those who watched it.

It was pretty clear — even then — that the availability of the tools for production and distribution of, well, everything would only increase over time. I’d used modems to talk to far-away computers, watched the Z-Channel (blessed by Theta, the cable goddess), and read enough science fiction to know this.

And of course it was obvious that universal knowledge, omniscience even, was similarly inevitable. Asimov’s “Multivac” and Leinster’s “Logic Named Joe” both describe our internet and its search engines quite precisely (except for the advertisements).

I had assumed, in my optimistic and simple youth, that of course these imminent tools would be put to use in a spectacle of unleashed creativity. Who wouldn’t want to compose symphonies, film epics, create paradises both virtual and real?

What I didn’t realize was that the technology itself would be so fetishized. I don’t mean the technopagans who wear old circuit boards. That’s just fine, works for me. Great fashion.

I’m referring to the fact that on the whole we don’t exploit this amazing data-processing power for creativity, but for fetishistic clerical work. I don’t mean spreadsheets and payroll, those are fine things too, good uses for computers. The spreadsheet is a rather amazing invention, actually.

I’m referring to fetishistic clerical work that is voluntarily performed. Everyone’s busy rearranging their hard disks. Cataloging files. Trying to keep their photo collection organized. Futzing with backup utilities or — more often — simply worrying about their lack of a backup strategy.

But even these activities are explicable. One’s data is important, someone must take care of it. But how much time is spent organizing other people’s data?

OK, maybe you don’t have a vast collection of BitTorrent files of obscure television programs, or a carefully alphabetized (but never used) suite of pirated high-end software titles. Or maybe you do… But I’ll bet you digitize your CDs. I’ll bet you’ve gone to the store, purchased a piece of plastic, taken it home to your computer, and run an audio compressor on it, and maybe, must maybe, typed in the track names. You had to choose which compression and quality settings to use. Because you own that piece of plastic.

It makes me mad.

But here’s an example of the next stage of inexcusable fetishistic parallelism:

http://www.slingmedia.com/us/

This is a box which you hook up to your cable teevee tuner at home. It digititizes your tuner, and then streams it out onto the internet.

So now you can, in addition to your role as an archivist of other people’s music, be your own cable network, rebroadcasting cable teevee from your home to… wherever you are now. Here’s a user anecdote, from a coworker: “He watches TV during boring university lectures and his parents, who live in Colombia, are able to follow all of US shows and sports.” Ye gads. A lifeline to your living room, so if you’re in class, or the wrong country, you don’t miss any shows.

The internet, golden and glowing, crisscrossed and saturated with data! How joyous! How millennial! How Gibson-on-the-half-shell! Until you look closer and see that it’s everyone clogging the wires routing and endlessly reduplicating the same stale bits.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s better than being a stinky hippie trading cassettes of Grateful Dead shows.

Right?

Right?