Hacking A Home

I was about to touch the knife to the surface of the pineapple before me, when I couldn't do it anymore. I paused, to allow the shard of thought that had hit me, to settle. What I was about to do, I realized, was, in essence, impale someone's home.

The yellow-fleshed fruit is the residence of SpongeBob SquarePants, a yellow, fictional cartoon character, who is very dear to my heart. I see him as a living, clear-souled, little boy, in a pair of angular pants that remind me of a brown matchbox with slits.

Slicing up the spiny, edible oval on the table would render him homeless—and in the cruelest possible way. I pictured myself heartlessly driving a sword through his leafy roof as he and his pet snail, Gary, lolled in their living room. This imaginary action of mine, in turn, triggered an inexplicable wave of remorse, a cold sadness.

Because I anthropomorphize things, I tend to get sentimental about them and develop a fondness for them. A pedestal fan becomes livelier than a device that just churns still air; a laptop cushion becomes more than a mere support; a soft toy becomes as large as life. 

So I see the pineapple—as something beyond and more than what it apparently is. Why do emotional cars, ambulatory trees, cordon-blue rats, clarinet-playing squids, sentient toys, angry gods, make me happy? 

People, as they are, are not very likeable and dealing with them can be a social drudgery. Animation characters, however, though mimic human behavior, they embody traits, in their unadulterated forms, which make them uncomplicated creatures, easy to read and get along with. 

As a matter of fact, I am in complete agreement with Paul Davies, chair of the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Post-Detection Task Force, who, in an interview with The Guardian, said, he doesn't trust people, but he does have great faith in aliens. 

Before Disney’s mission statement became obfuscated by abstruse corporate jargon, it used to be very simple and very clear: “to make people happy.” Its media productions do indeed make us happy. Ever wonder why? They're not about people, as they are. 

Watchable Books

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So runs Arthur C. Clarke's third law of prediction. But, magic can inspire gee-whiz technology.

When J.K. Rowling created the richly imaginative “Harry Potter” universe, she populated it with goods and services that may have sowed the seeds of technological ideas for a future Muggle world.

Consider The Daily Prophet, the leading daily of the (British) wizard community. What was most unusual—and awesome about it, were its photographs. The subjects in them were captured within frames, yet were oddly free to move about within them. The editorial text, however, was static. The newspaper was remarkable in that it combined two distinct types of media: print and video.

The Entertainment Weekly came close to combining mixed-media content. Well, sort of.

In the New York and Los Angles editions of the September 18, 2009 issue, CBS ran a video-in-print campaign to promote a lineup of its upcoming shows. A flexible, ultra-thin, 2 inch by 1.5 inch screen was embedded into a two-page ad that started playing when the page was opened.

We haven’t seen any more of those, since.

The “Minority Report,” a film set in the year 2054, featured a superbly futuristic version of USA TODAY, with streaming headlines that self-updated according to the news of the hour.

 

The present day American media and publishing landscape has been able to integrate media on scale that is a far less grand. A surface that is made of trees has no room for silicon chips in it. A book that is stored in the form of bytes cannot be marked using a lead pencil.

The future is not here yet.

The closest we have come to products that remotely resemble The Daily Prophet or the cinematic edition of USA TODAY are “vooks.” Hybrid e-books that meld film, music, prose, and social share functions, vooks can be watched as they are read.

 

What a bummer.

Outsourcing The Self

Often times, we don’t know what we want. Believe it or not, one can seek the service of a professional “wantologist” to help us get in touch with our innermost desires—for a fee, of course.  

[…] the mere existence of a paid wantologist indicates just how far the market has penetrated our intimate lives. Can it be that we are no longer confident to identify even our most ordinary desires without a professional to guide us?

In a world that undermines community and is wary of government, the number of available personal services is likely to proliferate. As will the cultural belief in the superiority of what’s for sale and a tendency to disparage our “amateur versions of life.” 

Consider some recent shifts in language. Care of family and friends is increasingly referred to as “lay care.” The act of meeting a romantic partner at a flesh-and-blood gathering rather than online is disparaged by some dating coaches as “dating in the wild.”

This is a never-ending cycle. How will I know whether I want a "wantologist"?

(Via The New York Times)