Filed under: The even grimmer future
Headphones on. Listening to Sonic Youth’s Reena from their new CD, Rather Ripped. And also, selections from The Duke Spirit’s Cuts Across the Land.
This leads, somehow, to an approximate approximation of an altered state.
But never mind that.
…
more at mark ryden.com
When I came home yesterday, there was another intriguing message left on the answering machine. It’s in Russian; you can listen to it here.
But never mind that.
…
In 2004, at SIGGRAPH, Bruce Sterling said:
“Today, most consumers know little or nothing about their possessions. They might know the brand, because brand awareness has been forced on them for years, at great expense, by massive product advertising. A Spime, by contrast, is an object that can link to and swiftly reveal most everything about itself. It might as well do this, since Google is perfectly capable of telling you everything anyway.”
[...]
“A Spime is today’s entire industrial process, made explicit. That is the whole shebang, explicitly tied to the object itself. A Spime is an object that ate and internalized the previous industrial order.”
Which inspired me to go to my bathroom’s medicine cabinet and retrieve a bottle of eye drops. What would this object be, how would it behave if, instead of being only a textually communicative thing it electronically advertised its properties?
The eye drops have the following ingredients:
- Naphazoline HCI
- Pheniramine maleate
Would I, say, place the bottle next to a spime-reading PDA and see, among other information (the bottle’s history and disposal procedures, for ex.) this:
Napthazoline (in the hydrochloride form) is the common name for 2-(1-Naphthylmethyl)-2-imidazoline hydrochloride, an α-adrenergic agonist that functions as a decongestant and vasoconstrictor. It’s commonly used in over-the-counter and prescription eye drops, to eliminate redness and inflammation.
It has the molecular formula C14H14N2.HCl and a molecular weight of 246.73 g/mol.
Pheniramine maleate is an antihistamine used to treat allergic conditions such as hay fever or urticaria. It is generally sold in combination with other medications, rather than as a stand-alone drug.