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Colonisation of everyday life
November 26, 2002 - 7:58am -- hydrarchist
Shortly before delivering our presentation in Berlin, I nipped out to try and find an internet cafe so as to print out some notes. My demands were not particularly extravagant: all the necessary materials were stored on web pages and the simplest word processing/notepad software would be quite adequate. Given that we were in the Unversity district, I did not anticipate that this would present any great difficulty. After a half an hours roaming the zone, I eventually came across a 'copy and surf' centre, that seemed reasonably priced and had printing facilities. So I seated myself in front of the flat panel monitor and started hauling the pages with the necessary docs. The browser was based on the Site Kiosk model, which appears to be a customised mozilla build, and it looked rather odd. Fact is that they had excised the drop down menus all together. As I needed to copy and paste some things into a text editor this was annoying, but as an experienced keyboard jockey I relaxed in the expectation that I could override these softwired handicaps.
No dice.
The fuckers had disabled all keyboard commands.They had abolished the ability to copy.
Enraged start hunting around for access to the start menu to crank up notepad. No dice. The OS had been configured so as to only allow the user, or rather serf, to use one application at a time, browsing or text composition, but never the two simulatneously.
Bamboozled, I hailed the shop assistant as she walked past, conviced that there must be some way of extracting myself from this idiocy. When I explained to her what I wanted to do, her face became stoney: no way. For purposes undoubtedly of profit maximisation and intellectual property feudalism, this chain had basically abolished two of the three fundamental qualities of modern computing: recombinance and multitasking. The third, networking, had been rendered irrelevant by the impossibility of moving documents off the network to the desktop.
Wandering gloomily away from this sad scene, ity occurred to me that when we rail against the logic determining the new inflections of technology we can become inured the rality of the stakes at play in the conflict.
Shortly before delivering our presentation in Berlin, I nipped out to try and find an internet cafe so as to print out some notes. My demands were not particularly extravagant: all the necessary materials were stored on web pages and the simplest word processing/notepad software would be quite adequate. Given that we were in the Unversity district, I did not anticipate that this would present any great difficulty. After a half an hours roaming the zone, I eventually came across a 'copy and surf' centre, that seemed reasonably priced and had printing facilities. So I seated myself in front of the flat panel monitor and started hauling the pages with the necessary docs. The browser was based on the Site Kiosk model, which appears to be a customised mozilla build, and it looked rather odd. Fact is that they had excised the drop down menus all together. As I needed to copy and paste some things into a text editor this was annoying, but as an experienced keyboard jockey I relaxed in the expectation that I could override these softwired handicaps.
No dice.
The fuckers had disabled all keyboard commands.They had abolished the ability to copy.
Enraged start hunting around for access to the start menu to crank up notepad. No dice. The OS had been configured so as to only allow the user, or rather serf, to use one application at a time, browsing or text composition, but never the two simulatneously.
Bamboozled, I hailed the shop assistant as she walked past, conviced that there must be some way of extracting myself from this idiocy. When I explained to her what I wanted to do, her face became stoney: no way. For purposes undoubtedly of profit maximisation and intellectual property feudalism, this chain had basically abolished two of the three fundamental qualities of modern computing: recombinance and multitasking. The third, networking, had been rendered irrelevant by the impossibility of moving documents off the network to the desktop.
Wandering gloomily away from this sad scene, ity occurred to me that when we rail against the logic determining the new inflections of technology we can become inured the rality of the stakes at play in the conflict.