extellevision

iii.
So what does the ultiumate grassroots set-top box have to do with digital paper?

We're so glad you asked.

Paper set the Information free from the Word of Mouth by it's economy. It set the Information free of immutability by its transience. Our computers are stone tablets, tied to our desks in the pyramids of Commerce, our chosen religion. Our PDAs and other toys are clay tablets, too complex to produce at anything like the scale of the Information, too costly to be used for anything significant but business. A thousand years away when our ancestors dig their way out of the mess we've made and begin to piece together the fragments we will leave in the landfills and fallen buildings they will marvel at the worthless dross we built such tiny wonders to contain.

But more than anything, by its simplicity, its blankness, its apolitical utilitarianism, paper unleashed the latent wild diversity and astonishing mutagenic power of the Information. Memories stories songs and languages uncounted died on the tenuous vine of kinship and human society, the slenderest thread of meaning preserved through the ages. The tradition of the spoken tongue could persist and to some extent preserve our collective train of thought, but it could not capture its history, its unique character in every generation. Information survived but its history and geneology were lost. The past necessarily became mythology and so was lost.

Paper changed everything.

Teevee, the aptly named tube, is our oral tradition, our storyteller, our cultural memory. It is a paltry shadow of the long gone golden age of the tale, when any illiterate knew ten thousand lines by heart. But its all we've got, the only thing most of us have in common.

And so the transformation of the Information by the medium of digital paper must come by the teevee. But the unleashing of the Next Age will be thwarted as long as the Tube is everywhere shrunk, filtered, compromised and controlled. The last fifty years have been spent teaching us to get less and call it more. We will dwindle to a trickle and choke like yeasts in the excrement of our own stifled creativity before another century has passed. Our only hope is assert what we have always known: that teevee BELONGS to US, dammit, regardless of who produces or pays for it. So we must control the filter, expand the tube at will, connect it to any source we like.

And if you don't believe it is so, it seems a grandiose justification for the lure of reruns on demand, wait and see how they fight us, tooth and nail, every step of the way.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.