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#anyway ik we do talk abt this stuff a lot but i just wanna acknowledge it
bodymachine · 1 year
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i think part of the reason that machines and obsolete pieces of technology are so viscerally interesting to us is because they remind us of our own bodies. things with buttons and levers and wires not only invite physical interaction (which is something beautiful and potentially radical in and of itself!!) but are easily anthropomorphized in that their heft and clunkiness elicit a sort of empathy in us. we realize that our bodies are not so different from machines, and it’s not because our bodies are sterile and cold and unfeeling, but because we all have these tangled insides and a desire to touch and to take up space in the world. we have such complicated relationships to our own bodies and we like tech that shows us how it can be touched and how it was assembled and how it can work and how it can fail. it is kind of body horror. it’s grotesque and erotic. we also realize that analog devices are being replaced and phased out of existence, and so there’s even more of an impulse to connect with them.
newer designs tend to emphasize sleekness and thinness and quiet and invisible parts and instantaneous results. i’ve heard of macbooks and iphones being described as sexy. they are not. a real sexy machine evokes the heat and weight and grittiness and entangledness of sex. so the condensing of functions into one tiny digital device and the storage of information in some invisible cloud and the forced reliance on a few entities that control the ‘progress’ of all that—as freeing as all of that can be in many ways that are worth considering, the implications for the future of our own bodily autonomy can definitely be frightening. i think that’s why it’s important to be intentional and interested in our physical interactions with any kind of object, but especially the old and the ordinary ones. to insist that they not become obsolete to us, and to insist on our ability to choose how they fit into our lives. that can be a sort of resistance to capitalism i think, that can start on the smallest level. that’s mostly what it boils down to, to me.
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