tinkerers to get a lot of materials and to assemble them without knowing a whole lot about advanced materials science. Wasn’t it like this when the Internet was starting out?”
“Woah,” Suzanne said. “I just realized that you wouldn’t really remember those days, back in the early nineties.”
“Sure I remember them. I was a kid, but I remember them fine!”
She felt very old. “The thing was that no one really suspected that there were so many liberal arts majors lurking in the nation’s universities, dying to drop out and learn perl and HTML.”
Perry cocked his head. “Yeah, I guess that’s analogous. The legacy of the dotcom years for me is all this free infrastructure, very cheap network connections and hosting companies and so on. That, I guess, combined with people willing to use it. I never really thought of it, but there must have been a lot of people hanging around in the old days who thought email and the net were pretty sketchy, right?”
She waved her hands at him. “Perry, lad, you don’t know the half of it. There are still executives in the rustbelt who spend bailout money on secretaries to print out their email and then dictate replies into tape recorders to be typed and sent.”
He furrowed his thick eyebrows. “You’re joking,” he said
She put her hand on her heart. “I kid you not. I knew people in the newsroom at the Detroit Free Press. There are whole industries in this country that are living in the last century.
“Well, for me, all that dotcommie stuff was like putting down a good base, making it easy for people like me to get parts and build-logs and to find hardware hackers to jam with.”
Perry got engrossed in a tricky bit of engine-in-seashell then and she wandered over to Lester, who was printing out more Barbie heads for a much larger version of his mechanical computer. “It’ll be able to add, subtract, and multiply any two numbers up to 99,” he said. “It took decades to build a vacuum-tube machine that could do that much—I’m doing it with switches in just three revs. In your face, UNIVAC!”
She laughed. He had a huge bag of laser-cut soda-can switches that he was soldering onto a variety of substrates from polished car-doors to a bamboo tiki-bar. She looked closely at the solder. “Is this what sweatshop solder looks like?”
He looked confused, then said, “Oh! Right, Perry’s thing. Yeah, anything not done by a robot has this artisanal quality of blobbiness, which I quite like, it’s aesthetic, like a painting with visible brushstrokes. But Perry’s right: if you see solder like this on anything that there are a million of, then you know that it was laid down by kids and women working for slave wages. There’s no way it’s cheaper to make a million solders by hand than by robot unless your labor force is locked in, force-fed amphetamine, and destroyed for anything except prostitution inside of five years. But here, in something like this, so handmade and one of a kind, I think it gives it a nice cargo-cult neoprimitive feel. Like a field of hand-tilled furrows.”
She nodded. Today she was keeping her computer out, writing down quotes and tweeting thoughts as they came. They worked side by side in companionable silence for a while as she killed a couple thousand spams and he laid down a couple dozen blobs of solder.
“How do you like Florida?” he said, after straightening up and cracking his back.
She barely stopped typing, deep into some email: “It’s all right, I suppose.”
“There’s great stuff here if you know where to look. Want me to show you around a little tonight? It’s Friday, after all.”
“Sounds good. Is Perry free?”
It took her a second to register that he hadn’t answered. She looked up and saw he was blushing to the tips of his ears. “I thought we could go out just the two of us. Dinner and a walk around the deco stuff on Miami Beach?”
“Oh,” she said. And the weird thing was, she took it
“Woah,” Suzanne said. “I just realized that you wouldn’t really remember those days, back in the early nineties.”
“Sure I remember them. I was a kid, but I remember them fine!”
She felt very old. “The thing was that no one really suspected that there were so many liberal arts majors lurking in the nation’s universities, dying to drop out and learn perl and HTML.”
Perry cocked his head. “Yeah, I guess that’s analogous. The legacy of the dotcom years for me is all this free infrastructure, very cheap network connections and hosting companies and so on. That, I guess, combined with people willing to use it. I never really thought of it, but there must have been a lot of people hanging around in the old days who thought email and the net were pretty sketchy, right?”
She waved her hands at him. “Perry, lad, you don’t know the half of it. There are still executives in the rustbelt who spend bailout money on secretaries to print out their email and then dictate replies into tape recorders to be typed and sent.”
He furrowed his thick eyebrows. “You’re joking,” he said
She put her hand on her heart. “I kid you not. I knew people in the newsroom at the Detroit Free Press. There are whole industries in this country that are living in the last century.
“Well, for me, all that dotcommie stuff was like putting down a good base, making it easy for people like me to get parts and build-logs and to find hardware hackers to jam with.”
Perry got engrossed in a tricky bit of engine-in-seashell then and she wandered over to Lester, who was printing out more Barbie heads for a much larger version of his mechanical computer. “It’ll be able to add, subtract, and multiply any two numbers up to 99,” he said. “It took decades to build a vacuum-tube machine that could do that much—I’m doing it with switches in just three revs. In your face, UNIVAC!”
She laughed. He had a huge bag of laser-cut soda-can switches that he was soldering onto a variety of substrates from polished car-doors to a bamboo tiki-bar. She looked closely at the solder. “Is this what sweatshop solder looks like?”
He looked confused, then said, “Oh! Right, Perry’s thing. Yeah, anything not done by a robot has this artisanal quality of blobbiness, which I quite like, it’s aesthetic, like a painting with visible brushstrokes. But Perry’s right: if you see solder like this on anything that there are a million of, then you know that it was laid down by kids and women working for slave wages. There’s no way it’s cheaper to make a million solders by hand than by robot unless your labor force is locked in, force-fed amphetamine, and destroyed for anything except prostitution inside of five years. But here, in something like this, so handmade and one of a kind, I think it gives it a nice cargo-cult neoprimitive feel. Like a field of hand-tilled furrows.”
She nodded. Today she was keeping her computer out, writing down quotes and tweeting thoughts as they came. They worked side by side in companionable silence for a while as she killed a couple thousand spams and he laid down a couple dozen blobs of solder.
“How do you like Florida?” he said, after straightening up and cracking his back.
She barely stopped typing, deep into some email: “It’s all right, I suppose.”
“There’s great stuff here if you know where to look. Want me to show you around a little tonight? It’s Friday, after all.”
“Sounds good. Is Perry free?”
It took her a second to register that he hadn’t answered. She looked up and saw he was blushing to the tips of his ears. “I thought we could go out just the two of us. Dinner and a walk around the deco stuff on Miami Beach?”
“Oh,” she said. And the weird thing was, she took it
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