Mid-afternoon, after picking blackberries—the ripe the soft, the hard, the unwilling, a few more pounds for wine, trip up in advance, these paths are getting overgrown—I read a couple of sentences of Electronic Civil Disobedience from the Critical Art Ensemble (1996). The book fell open on a paragraph about people buying VCRs, not knowing how to use them and feeling they'd bought an expensive clock that only ever said 12:00.
Cheerful tech naivete and derision from twenty-five years earlier. Strangely uplifting.
By evening the blackberries were crushed, mashed, covered in water, en route in a bucket in the kitchen.
Our current woe, twenty-five years later, is that babes and sucklings know how to use everything they buy or that is bought for them. Nearly all of them tell the time.
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