OUTMODED
I have written here about the magic of the computer and the computer driven devices linked to the Internet that allow me live much more simply. I have two trunks of handwritten journals that stare at me across the room, written before the arrival of personal computers. As soon as I could afford a computer I shifted over to a IBM PC Junior with almost no memory. And while traveling I used one of the first laptops, a small Tandy 101, with even less memory. I have been writing daily journals on a laptop ever since. When I discovered streaming music through Apple Music I stopped buying first long playing records and then CD’s. And a few years ago I stopped buying books and shifted to ebooks on Amazon Kindle. No more VHS tapes or CD copies of movies, now I stream everything. And so everything I desire fits into a backpack. I am free.
Ah, but here comes the rub. When I began to sort through the contents of my carport, back against the wall, hidden from sight by other boxes of stuff piled up later, was box after box of forgotten outmoded digital equipment and tangles of wires and endless floppy disks and CD’s of stuff that I had stored long ago.
I knew during all these thirty years since I got my first personal computer that every year something new and better had come along which I had eagerly adopted and delighted in. And here was all this stuff, covered with dust, old cables dried out and cracking, floppy drives corroding, CD’s storing so little that I have hundreds of them, portable hard drives holding so little that I had to keep adding new ones until I now have thirty or so portable hard drives.
And to complicate all of these devices, the chargers that connected them to power changed in plugin sizes from device to device leaving with me a large box of miscellaneous chargers with no idea what connects to what. And to make matters even worse, the wires that connected these devices to each other had different types of connection plugs using different programs. The result is that I have almost no idea how to retrieve any of the information on these different forms of storage.
Some of this clutter, for instance the tape cassettes used by the early Tandy need readers and wires that utilize forgotten computer programs that are now indecipherable to me so that all I can do is to throw them out with all the information on them. I don’t have any readers for the old floppy disks, carefully labeled, and suspect that the disks are corroded in any case. The CD’s and the portable drives, if I can find the right readers and cords to connect them are probably still readable, but I shifted to Apple from PC’s half way through and the Word Perfect programming on the PCs is hard to read. My only hope is to save the photographs that I began to take with digital cameras in 1998.
I have about 10 milk cartons full of this stuff and the old devices I used to use. But the moral of this story is that in the shift from manual to digital that I have so delighted in and adopted all these years, I have avoided thinking about the consequences of the digital revolution, completely closing my mind to what I (and I expect almost everyone else) has been been getting into. And now I am facing a reckoning and am overwhelmed.
The digital revolution that is powering change in the world that is overwhelming us and dislocating economies and cultural values and causing terrible polarization, is also leaving a stream of outmoded digital junk and tangles of wires that I am trying to decipher.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 