Well, this week I turned 30 and celebrated by acquiring an iRiver - a gadget a bit like an ipod but with a few extra bits and pieces. It plays video files you know. 10 frame per second video files on a pitifully small screen, but you know, wow, amazing!
We live in a golden age of gadgetism, largely spearheaded by ipods and cellphones. It makes our puny tape playing walkmans, digital watches and pocket calculators of yesteryear seem nonsense.
While enjoying the freedom to wander around listening to every album I own (and *ahem* a few I don't) without having to carry around a stereo and a crate of CDs, I still have a nagging suspicion it's all bullshit. Sure portable music players make accessing music easier, but they don't the music sound any better. True, they're not a real blight on modern society like the cellphone, but when you think about the real issues of our age - terrorism, climate change, etc, all this seems so ridiculously trivial. As my granny would put it, it's EVIL.
Another technological revelation I recently experienced was when I installed the latest version of Winamp and checked out their visualisation suite (the eyecandy you watch while listening to music).
Now I'm a big fan of trippy computer graphics - I'm used to old Winamp visualisation favourites like Geiss all the way back to ancient trippynesses like Fractint and Acidwarp in DOS. However, this new shit is unbelievable. It feels an order of magnitude more hallucinogenic than old stuff. Install it and see what I mean.
So all that's great, but again I feel a little sad. At its fringes consumerism does really provide us with fragments of a kind of technological utopia, but at the same time the existence of social injustice and poverty in the world really throws it into a relief that suggests that rather than being a fruit of progress, it's just self-indulgent and solipsistic.
I also bought myself a copy of Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, which perhaps explains the tenor of this post.