The Dream of the Personal Machine
Metadata
Highlights
- My book is so much about how technology dictates culture. The devices that we use aren’t just accessories to culture or windows that we consume things through; they are collaborators, gateways, and molds. “The medium is the message,” as McLuhan wrote, is another version of this idea — or at least that the medium is inextricable from the meaning. My latest column for The New Yorker brought it up, too. I reviewed Laine Nooney’s book Apple II Age about “personal computers” and the evolution of the idea that computers belong in the home, on an individual desktop. That wasn’t inevitable; the idea of a personal computer had to be invented, manufactured, and marketed. We had to imagine computers as personal machines. (View Highlight)
- Note: and so what if we imagined computers as communal machines?
New highlights added June 16, 2023 at 5:19 PM
In 2004 or so my parents got me a Palm Pilot-esque device to play around with. It had a few buttons, a stylus hidden in the top, and a slide-out full keyboard — a messy, chunky thing in shiny, gray plastic. I remember mostly messing around with the firmware, trying to modify it so I could install emulators to play video games. The screen would fill with inscrutable command-line text that my feeble programming skills balked at. The games worked — barely. But I got an epic sense of agency from being able to carry around and modify this personal, digital tool. I still remember the awe I got from the gleaming glass screen that I could carry around and put in my pocket. (By the time I got my first iPhone in 2010, the very same experiences had become mundane.) (View Highlight)- Where did I get that desire from for a computer that was both personal and portable, a little Swiss army knife of technology? Or where did I get my imagined image of it, the subconscious dream that heightened it from a banal scheduling device to something (hypothetically, in the future) life-changing? I think for me it came from anime. I grew up on the Pokemon and Digimon television shows, in that order. Pokemon had its Pokedex, the bright-red flip-phone device that catalogued every creature in the world and displayed maps and charts. Digimon (by far the emotionally deeper show, underrated) had the Digivice, a much more evocative tool that beamed the holder literally into another, virtual universe and helped their pet monsters evolve. The young heroes of these shows got agency from their devices, too — the devices were representations, perhaps, of their control over their own lives and the adventures they were on, something that I desperately wanted. If you had the device, you could do anything, go anywhere. (View Highlight)
- The iPhone isn’t escapist; maybe it just reinforces the grip of our established, boring, capitalist reality. The iPhone doesn’t present itself as transcendental; it no longer feels like a new way of understanding or engaging with the world. It only refers to itself, its own banal virtual environment, which amounts to a vast storefront. When I look at these decades-old images, the hint of a button or antenna portends more possibility than any app I can download. I want a device that is truly personal, in that it is a reflection of the self (unique, changing, unstable). A device that urges its holder into new, unfamiliar places. That dream of agency is still there, unfulfilled.
(View Highlight)
The Dream of the Personal Machine
Metadata
Highlights
- My book is so much about how technology dictates culture. The devices that we use aren’t just accessories to culture or windows that we consume things through; they are collaborators, gateways, and molds. “The medium is the message,” as McLuhan wrote, is another version of this idea — or at least that the medium is inextricable from the meaning. My latest column for The New Yorker brought it up, too. I reviewed Laine Nooney’s book Apple II Age about “personal computers” and the evolution of the idea that computers belong in the home, on an individual desktop. That wasn’t inevitable; the idea of a personal computer had to be invented, manufactured, and marketed. We had to imagine computers as personal machines. (View Highlight)
- Note: and so what if we imagined computers as communal machines?
-
In 2004 or so my parents got me a Palm Pilot-esque device to play around with. It had a few buttons, a stylus hidden in the top, and a slide-out full keyboard — a messy, chunky thing in shiny, gray plastic. I remember mostly messing around with the firmware, trying to modify it so I could install emulators to play video games. The screen would fill with inscrutable command-line text that my feeble programming skills balked at. The games worked — barely. But I got an epic sense of agency from being able to carry around and modify this personal, digital tool. I still remember the awe I got from the gleaming glass screen that I could carry around and put in my pocket. (By the time I got my first iPhone in 2010, the very same experiences had become mundane.) (View Highlight)
- Where did I get that desire from for a computer that was both personal and portable, a little Swiss army knife of technology? Or where did I get my imagined image of it, the subconscious dream that heightened it from a banal scheduling device to something (hypothetically, in the future) life-changing? I think for me it came from anime. I grew up on the Pokemon and Digimon television shows, in that order. Pokemon had its Pokedex, the bright-red flip-phone device that catalogued every creature in the world and displayed maps and charts. Digimon (by far the emotionally deeper show, underrated) had the Digivice, a much more evocative tool that beamed the holder literally into another, virtual universe and helped their pet monsters evolve. The young heroes of these shows got agency from their devices, too — the devices were representations, perhaps, of their control over their own lives and the adventures they were on, something that I desperately wanted. If you had the device, you could do anything, go anywhere. (View Highlight)
- The iPhone isn’t escapist; maybe it just reinforces the grip of our established, boring, capitalist reality. The iPhone doesn’t present itself as transcendental; it no longer feels like a new way of understanding or engaging with the world. It only refers to itself, its own banal virtual environment, which amounts to a vast storefront. When I look at these decades-old images, the hint of a button or antenna portends more possibility than any app I can download. I want a device that is truly personal, in that it is a reflection of the self (unique, changing, unstable). A device that urges its holder into new, unfamiliar places. That dream of agency is still there, unfulfilled.
(View Highlight)
