Electricity banished shadows—but shadows are “shades,” souls, the souls of light itself. Even divine light, when it loses its organic and secret darkness, becomes a form of pollution. In prison cells electric lights are never doused; light becomes oppression and source of disease.
– Peter Lamborn Wilson
Enter Otetsudai Networks. With Otetsudai Networks, if you are willing to work, you sign up for the service with your skills and focus, take a GPS reading on your phone and then just hang out. If you are looking for someone for say… 3 hours to man a cash register or help wash dishes, you just send the request to Otetsudai Networks and within minutes, you have a list of people available. The list shows what each person is qualified for, how others have rated their work and exactly how far away they are. Typically you will receive a list of half a dozen or more people within a few minutes.
Jorge Luis Borges envisioned the risks of perfect memory in his famous story “Funes the Memorious,” about a man gifted with unlimited recall, and paralyzed by it. Perhaps not even Borges, however, could have imagined our present capacity to accumulate and preserve memory in digital form - or the powerful impact it is already having on individual lives, as temporary indiscretions become part of the permanent record. “What you do online is potentially there forever,” says Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “Delete if you want; ask Google to take down that one unflattering photo - but it’s still saved, archived, somewhere.”
– Jessica Winter
See also: Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing
I can’t remember to forget you.
– Leonard Shelby in Memento
The Black Hole : Los Alamos Laboratory Salvage Yard:
Every teenager dreams of working in a giant warehouse full of discarded nuclear test equipment, well used high-pressure vacuum fittings and an endless assortment of puzzling devices which may or may not have any value in the modern era. Ok, so maybe not every teenager has this dream, I was and still am somewhat of a strange person, but in High School in New Mexico, this particular dream of mine came true.
– Dave Bullock
