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Why do those essays read like the watch that they look at every hour somehow became illegal in the last decade? You can buy one. People still make clothes, pencils, cutlery, automatic watches, furniture — more than they ever did at any point in the past. Automation, electrification, motorization has allowed considerable wealth that has made making all those terminal products that much cheaper, reliable, and easy to do the little maintenance that they do need. Regretting that there is an alternative to a Casio F-91W is missing that there are more of those made today than in the 90s. Billions more people can afford it now than they ever could, because, among other things, the farmer who collected the latex to make the bracelet can check, on their Android phone, the weather, or whether the bug they found on one of their tree might wipe out their plantation; the driver who delivered a shipment of those watches to the harbor can call the factory admin to fix a paperwork issue. Like the author, I have some nostalgia about that exact watch: my dad still wears it every day, like he did throughout the 70s, after his dad gave it to him as a present for going to work abroad (in a humid country where a mechanical watch would not have been reasonable to bring). I don’t know how much my grand-father paid for it, but it couldn’t have been cheap given how my dad talks about it. The parallel stories put both of our family in a minority who were privileged then and are privileged today. We could afford that watch then, when it was the pinnacle of technology, and we can afford the latest iPhone now because we are privileged. $21 is a lot for a lot of people; a second-hand Android can cost five times more. That’s also a lot for people who need more than the time and a beeping alarm to work, pay their taxes, keep their paperwork handy, etc. Those need more updates because they can do a lot, which means bad people are trying to hack into those, and about their power. Incredibly smart and generous security researchers have been able to find ways they could do that, fix those and share that with us. That’s as much a burden as pulling the ribbon around a birthday present. |