The Machine Doesn’t Care
In a very real way our childhoods have been made into something obsolete by way of our participation in a technocratic culture that generates a staggering amount of excess and waste. We have a lot invested in this waste, but we throw it away anyway. Why?
The gigantic LED ridden arrow of progress dictates that the new is superior to the old by virtue of its newness. We throw old systems away because we are convinced that the replacements will be better. What we don’t realize until later is that in the experiential realm of our childhoods, technological progress didn’t matter, and it matters even less in the realm of memory we experience now as adults. No one throws away a collection of photographs because digital photography is better than Polaroid—what’s important is the meaning attached to the photographs, which is to say the content that the technology houses or the memory that it triggers.
