Salon is serializing the first third of a novel I'm working on, whose working title is Themepunks. The first 50,000 words are a stand-alone short novel, and every week for ten weeks, Salon is publishing another ~5,000 words from the story.
The third installment is online. In this week's piece: Perry and Lester, the garage hackers that Andrea (the tech journalist) is profiling, take her on a tour of the new technology esthetic, brought on by the lost generation of out-of-work photoshoppers, html jocks, and perl hackers left behind by the dot-bomb.
He handed her a white brick, the size of a deck of cards. It took her a moment to recognize it as an iPod. "Christ, it's huge," she said.
"Yeah, isn't it just. Remember how small and shiny this thing was when it shipped? 'A thousand songs in your pocket!'"
That made her actually laugh out loud. She fished in her pocket for her earbuds and dropped them on the table where they clattered like M&Ms. "I think I've got about 40,000 songs on those. Haven't run out of space yet, either."
He rolled the buds around in his palm like a pair of dice. "You won't — I stopped keeping track of mine after I added my hundred-thousandth audiobook. I've got a bunch of the Library of Congress in mine as high-rez scans, too. A copy of the Internet Archive, every post ever made on Usenet… Basically, these things are infinitely capacious, given the size of the media we work with today." He rolled the buds out on the workbench and laughed. "And that's just the point! Tomorrow, we'll have some new extra fat kind of media and some new task to perform with it and some new storage medium that will make these things look like an old iPod. Before that happens, you want this to wear out and scuff up or get lost–"
"I lose those things all the time, like a set a month."
"There you go then! The iPods were too big to lose like that, but just look at them." He passed back the iPod. The chrome was scratched to the point of being fogged, like the mirror in a gas-station toilet. The screen was almost unreadable for all the scratches. "They had scratch-proof materials and hard plastics back then. They chose to build these things out of Saran Wrap and tin-foil so that by the time they doubled in capacity next year, you'd have already worn yours out and wouldn't feel bad about junking them.
"So I'm building a tape-loading seashell robot toaster out of discarded obsolete technology because the world is full of capacious, capable, disposable junk and it cries out to be used again. It's a potlatch: I have so much material and computational wealth that I can afford to waste it on frivolous junk. I think that's why the collectors buy it, anyway."
