Happiness Is a Warm iPhone - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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We fall in love with our technology. That’s how we talk about our gadgets — with the language of emotional attachment, with irrational expectations about happily ever after.
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I loved what was possible with it. Even though I wasn’t able to actually make it do anything, I knew that someone could. And that was enough, the mere idea of a machine, one that anyone could have in their home, that would take strings of symbols and turn them into music, into movement, into something else out there in the world.
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We’re certainly into the magic zone — and yet, the magic is somehow fading for me. Technology has crossed the uncanny valley; it is simply too good at representing our real world.
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As everything gets faster and richer and denser with information, as a whole new dimension to our physical world evolves online, some possibilities open up, and others close down. The potential congeals into the actual, the possible calcifies into the practical. What is imaginable gets pared down into what was actually imagined
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But things are by necessity amazing in a very specific way, and with a very specific visual grammar and conceptual environment — and that environment is one that is closed, controlled, packaged for us. We’re holding magic boxes, boxes that want to serve us and coddle us, instead of challenge us. And how can you love something that doesn’t challenge you?