Online
This Laptop is dead to me now
Got a job. Travel with the befuddled masses through traffic, into parking lots, through security guards, keycards, fingerprints. Interesting work, though a bit too much of it. The absence here, however, is not due to the time constraints (cause discipline seems to create time) but simple lack of connectivity. In between company laptops, spent a whole week without any computing power at all. Made me twitchy for a while and then I settled down. Weird how the most pressing issues just disappear into illusion. It actually felt like a bit of a vacation. So here’s to one week off the grid.
I’m trying to remember what I did before the Net. I didn’t have a personal computer (mine) till college, but we’d always had computers in the house. In school, however, I remember doing a lot of reading and writing which seem pointless today. Remember going to the library and what before writing papers, before Wikipedia. Used to write in journals too, but now anything I handwrite gets entirely redone when I need to put it in digital form. I also wonder what people did in offices before computers. Seems de rigeur. The modern business is composed of cogs, and their teeth are digital.
For the last week I’ve been reading, Maximum City by Suketa Mehta, guest at the recent Galle Literary Festival. Imposing novel, the size of a laptop, folded in two. At first I just read it in chunks, the part about Amitabh Bhachan, the dancing girls, the shooters. Now going through and filling in the gaps. A unique look into the sensual underbelly of Bombay.
Talk on the phone as well. Call the girlfriend to check my email and send a few response. More effective than my Pavlovian checking every 5 minutes, responding every never. Watch Star Wars, read magazines. Suppose these are the things one does without Internet.
my laptop died last year for about 2 months, and i found myself handwriting notes and then every ten mins reaching out to the top left of the paper to save it.
Book recommendation, along the line of being plugged in / not: “Feed” by M.T. Anderson. Seems like the kind of thing Barefoot miiiiight have.
Really nice post by the way. Sounds like authentic sf from the early 80s, picturing an online future.
Before a trip to Burma/Myanmar I had read in an outdated Lonely Planet guide that the government there had banned the entry of computing gadgets. Modems were apparently highly restricted. Turned out they had liberalised a little. I of course had arrived without even a digital watch. It was a week of liberation from the staring at the screen – in a police state too.