Salon has just posted part two of its ten-part serialization of my novel-in-progress, “Themepunks.” Last week, we met Andrea Fleeks, a tech journalist; Lionel Kettlewell, a brazen Silicon Valley VC; and Rat-Toothed Freddy, a sleazy UK tabloid tech journalist, and learned that Kettlewell had bought up and liquidated Kodak and Duracell, two companies that have no place in a filmless, batteryless twenty-first century. Kettlewell proposes to use the money to fund micro-startups that combine cool commodity hardware, open source software and imagination to create new tools that are profitable for 3-6 months, until they are cloned and the margin on them falls to near-zero.
In this week’s installment, Andrea goes on assignment to Hollywood, Florida, where she meets Lester and Perry, a pair of tech-freaks who live in a junkyard where they remix dead high-tech toys into one-of-a-kind works of art:
Perry set Boogie Woogie Elmo down on a workbench and worked a miniature USB cable into his chest cavity. The other end terminated with a PDA with a small rubberized photovoltaic cell on the front.
“This thing is running InstallParty — it can recognize any hardware and build and install a Linux distro on it without human intervention. They used a ton of different suppliers for the BWE, so every one is a little different, depending on who was offering the cheapest parts the day it was built. InstallParty doesn’t care, though: one click and away it goes.” The PDA was doing all kinds of funny dances on its screen, montages of playful photoshopping of public figures matted into historical fine art.
“All done. Now, have a look — this is a Linux computer with some of the most advanced robotics ever engineered. No sweatshop stuff, either, see this? The solder is too precise to be done by hand — that’s because it’s from India. If it was from Malaysia, you’d see all kinds of wobble in the solder: that means that tiny, clever hands were used to create it, which means that somewhere in the device’s karmic history, there’s a sweatshop full of crippled children inhaling solder fumes until they keel over and are dumped in a ditch. This is the good stuff.
“So we have this karmically clean robot with infinitely malleable computation and a bunch of robotic capabilities. I’ve turned these things into wall-climbing monkeys; I’ve modded them for a woman from the University of Miami at the Jackson Memorial who used their capability to ape human motions in physiotherapy programs with nerve-damage cases. But the best thing I’ve done with them so far is the Distributed Boogie Woogie Elmo Motor Vehicle Operation Cluster. Come on,” he said, and took off deeper into the barn’s depths.
Link to this week’s installment, Link to last week’s inaugural installment