Breaking Bread

-
Yesterday I called my mum using Alexa to talk her through making a loaf of bread using the sourdough starter my dad had collected from our doorstep. This, I thought, is truly the embodiment of how technology can bring people together. This is like an advert for Amazon’s devices I mused, imagining a TV commercial with emotive quirky piano music finishing with my dad popping up behind my mum at the end saying its very tasty as I call them after a long walk with my two sons. Part of me thought yes this is everything you rail against. I mean the way in which the consumer Spectacle represents life as a series of symbolic images. But then another part of me felt why should technology be seen as such a corrupting influence when invention and creative problem solving are part of the human experience? Would I care if anyone knew where I was or what my favourite google search was if I wasn’t born into a culture of Big Data duality? By this I mean that Technology has gradually shaped our sense of consciousness as something contained within a data processing machine and thus amplified the sense of individuality and now the protection of this separate unit’s privacy is paramount. Is it possible that we could decide to live like an indigenous culture sharing our technologies and constructions for the good of each other? It seems to be as simple as deciding that the tools we create do not have to create us. Altruism is indifferent to value judgements and awards it’s just a means of surviving through an embodied, collective sense of identity. Lockdown has for a time suspended the need to compete and we have had a glimpse of how we can serve each other but even now there is a creeping dread of the consumer model trying to take back control. I mean if we carry on like this the economy will collapse they cry when the economy is a just a technology we created to allow us to connect. Perhaps I mean that lockdown revealed the limits of a symbolic data-based identity. So I know my dad is telling the truth when he says the bread is very tasty and I tell my family I love them everyday now. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

COSMIKNOT > nomadic freedoms of the LyrriK Voyce

-
Image
the solution is a bassline and an ancient future outlook. Onward to p.e.a.c.e. Platforms Athens CosmiKnot spins the vestiges of the fake problem into duct tape fixing a funeral barge sailing to the moon with the precision of a tru throw away note trailing from the crumpled horn of 1/4 million miles Davis   Curated by Dr Mikey Georgeson and Samuel Zealey   30th March - 15th April AVA, UEL, E16 2RD A collective speculative temporary community. Re-enchanting the region of disenchantment through the shifting myth-concepts of Aesthetic Ontology.   CosmiKnot is a space to gather in community as social unit to understand through the speculative ritual of Perforum We selected artists with conviction in weaving specific contingent personal mythology into shifting performative ritual transformation of encounter with a materially vital entity that speaks back.   My-Key Hassan Aliyu, Yasmeen Ally El Araby, Bry Ford, Caroline Gregory, My-key, Isabell Metsäpelto, Tony Moon, Veneti...
Read more

Football dads

-
  I have become a football dad. Okay I was already one last season but that was football-dad-lite and came free. For a start it was, whisper it, a church league. There was always a prayer before kick off and one of the hazards was a certain coach who seemed to enjoy asking me, in a Columbo style line of questioning, to remind him which church we went to. My son’s team, despite being an overspill squad, won the league in what turned out to be a nail biting close to the season. This season he is playing for an eleven a side team and I am suddenly one of the squad drivers. Last week in the car park one of the boys remarked on the soft suspension and I became aware of just how low I had let the tyre pressure get. Now coming from a family of panickers I always get a sinking feeling when confronted with something as simple as a flat tyre. It feels like fate has caught up with me and has decided to show me I was never meant to be a vehicle owner (Our family panicking is well founded and n...
Read more

Tales from the village

-
Image
The village people gathered round and they asked him to tell them about how they might come to accept change more readily and so he told them a story.  One drizzly winter morning, the kind when the rain can hardly seemed bothered to make anything wet, a local university lecturer was preparing to leave his house with his two young sons, who were playing in the walled garden at the front of the house. The garden was leafy all year round and the man was proud that he had planted the deciduous shrubs himself. Suddenly he heard the raised tinkling voices of his children coming from outside and hurried to find out what the cause of their excitement was. The boys were in good humour but it seemed that one of the household's two tortoiseshell cats had somehow perched itself on the handlebars of the elder sons bicycle when it took its morning crap. In their endeavours to avoid the excrement the two sons had haphazardly engineered to spread small portions of it about their attire. Ther...
Read more