septimus
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 The Gadget as Fetish, or The Postmodern PDA
The Gadget as Fetish, or The Postmodern PDA
Communist Imagery and the PDA
-By Dieter Bohn
Preface
...This is what you get when you allow left-wing academics and technolgy to mix. Before, we had hypertextuality and the New Media, now you're stuck with some hack who's trying to poke you up by calling you a Red-loving commie radical. Hah!
Also note the postmodernism inherent in this essay isn't in its literal content, but in the subtext of how it regards itself and how its author regards it. i.e. as comple bulls**t. 
So the impetus of all this is I won the Treo and have been waiting a L_O_N_G time for it. I realized that I have spent quite a bit of time waiting for my next gadget. I further realized that quite a bit of the folk on this board spend quite a bit of time waiting for the next big thing.
The Gadget as Fetish
I've seen many references to gadget lust as a kind of addiction, that moment when you headily rip open the box and toss aside the extra paraphanelia and pull out the new thing is indeed a rush. And our time here spent speculating, hoping, wishing serves as a kind of self-help group for junkies.
I've also seen more than a few references to gadgets as a kind of religion. We turn our PDAs into fetishes, giving them a special importance in our lives and giving them burnt offerings of registered shareware, cases, and screen protection. Our time here spent adoring our fetishes and attacking the fetishes of others is a kind of group worship. We are a congregation of the gadget, placing it high in our pantheon of adoration.
Many people disclaim these metaphors by emphasizing the gadget's use as a tool. Indeed, much of our talk is about the various merits of different applications, buttons, and expansion options. The real ends, we tell ourselves, are our own lives and needs.
Of course, you have to be willing to admit that for those of us who freqent these gadget sites they are both a means and an end. The PDA is both a fetish and a hammer. But what happens when the tool becomes a fetish?. I'll tell you: In many ways, our love of technology is much like the communist's love of the proletariat.
Both claim that the reason for their obsession is actually the workings of reason on life. It's not, we claim, a religion or some dogmatic obesiance to a system of thought, but a practical solution based on our needs. This is, for a many communists and PDA enthusiasts, very true. Most international communists ended up deploring the U.S.S.R. and had real debates amongst themselves about communism and how it could help people. Similiarly, many PDA'ers argue against staid devotion to one camp (the PPCists, the SONYites) and talk of the utility of their fetishes.
On the flip side, when the chips are down, both seem to exhibit the very things they claim not to. They are based on need and reason, but act as a religion. Both turn tools into objects of abstraction and worship. The communists had the plow, the hammer and sickle, we have our gadgets. Even the names of the gadgets are fetishistic and sound, well, like proletarian rhetoric: the utilitarian numbering system of Palm, the mysterious Cli-A, the Treo, even our lovable Flip. Obviously, the tones of these images are different-communism was obsessed with the worker and the PDAer with technology-but the effects and the primal causes seem to be the same.
So what lessons can we draw from this? As I said, these thoughts have come about mainly due to my having to wait and my observations of the idealizations of the PDA future that I often see on these boards. Not only do we see predictions for "super-gadgets," but we see even the most practical among us yearn for future days when their PDA will be easy to use, to see, indeed, to love. The idealizations sound to me much like the early yearnings for the coming of the revolution. Someday all workers will be united. Someday the bourgeoise will fall.
If our fetishization of the tool we call the Palm is of the same time as the communist's fetishization of the worker and his craft, shouldn't we either go whole hog and join the movement (er, the company) or find some way to put it all in perspective--else we become dilletantes? If our waiting for the next big thing is of the same type as the communist's waiting for the revolution, ought we either work actively to bring this future about or at least be realistic about the present?
In short, shouldn't we start up our own company to combat these capitalist dogs? Or at least find a way to use the tool without fetishizing it?
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02-07-2002 06:10 PM
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