It wasn't the hardware that mattered but the ability to recomplicate information flows, to cut losses and grab the next new thing. By mastering new concepts and skill sets, people in and around high tech stay employable. They are also strictly required to do a great deal of forgetting... (45)An information economy is inherently low in backwaters, shelters, and sinecures. It lacks cozy places where people can potter along for decades, engaged in some single activity with some predictable rate of return. It follows that, in an information society, a formal education aimed at vocational success would not be about values or canons. It would lack eternal verities, moral codes, constitutional continuity, literary classics, and good old fashioned national heritage... (45-46)
Every generation rediscovers the harsh truth that our material goods are grossly unworthy of our feelings. (73)
...a singular totem object of contemporary times: the "blobject." The term was coined by contemporary designer Karim Rashid... with a little coaching, one can learn to see that blobjects are thriving in fantastic numbers and littering the modern landscape. They are computer-modeled objects manufactured out of blown goo. They are rounded, humpy, bumpy plastic creations... Blobjects carry the flag in a world whose manifest destiny is "organic behavior in a technological matrix." Chips shape them and make them behave. Computer-aided design and injection molding allow them to asume any form... (75-76)
(blobjects) are humble, disposable, and easy to miss. They resemble commensal organisms, little remoras or pilot fish, snuggling up to the human body, attaching themselves to belts and sneaking into purses and backpacks... They are the genuine avatars of contemporary technological circumstances, which are formlesss, full of opportunity, ultraflexible, and radically flimsy. Blobjects have something genuinely unsettling and uncanny about them. Their lines are sometimes Pokémon-cute, but they're commonly fungal, epicene, and creepy. (76-77, 78)
...the cell-phone company sells me a [cellphone] at a loss. It does this in order to entice me into a committed, networked relationship. The sexy hardware is merely a come-on; the relationship is what matters... they want me fully engaged in the process; they want to keep my eyeballs faithfully stuck to the screen and my fingertips caressing those little phone buttons for as long as possible. After all, they are selling me hours of use --not efficiency. People with simple, efficient, solitary lives don't much need cell phones. (86)
... a ductile, very capable, extremely demanding, disposable relationship machine... Many of the signature devices of our times are portals into long, complicated relationships with service industries. They are cell phones that sell hours, boom boxes that sell tapes, laptops that sell software. (87-88)
So "gizmo" is a better, more truthful term than "machine." Because a gizmo is a small, faddish, buzzy machine with a brief life span. Some gizmos are blobjects. Most blobjects are gizmos... A gizmo, like a cell phone or a jogging shoe, has more functions than the user will ever be able to master, deploy, or exploit. It is designed to have baroque and even ridiculous amounts of functionality. A gizmo "empowers the user" but not in any permanent or predictable way. It has irrational levels of power, which are based on experiential values like "fun" and "amusement" and "involvement" and "technical sweetness" and all things hip and designery.
A gizmo is neither a "machine" nor a "product." It doesn't want you to accomplish any task in particular. It wants a relationship; it wants to be an intimate experience, as close to you as your eyebrow. It wants you engaged, it wants you pushing those buttons, it wants you faithful to the brand name and dependent on the service. (89-90)
...the linchpin of the New World Order, is information management. (102)
This process of New World Disorder is impressively globalized. It starts with local resentments, but it works through offshore money. It is financed not by the suffering locals under the heels of the warlords but by the New World Order itself. Civilized states require some criminal services. Their populations have a great and abiding need for narcotics, refugee labor, red-light districts, money laundries, and so forth. These are dangerous and socially ruinous activities. So civilized states persecute them and, by fiat, export disorder into the weakest and least policed areas of the globe.
In practice, these lucrative crimes have ended up housed interritories that are commercialy worethless due to religious and ethnic tensions. So in a globalized world, the nations that break and fail become crooks. The workaday warlord biz talks religion all the time, but religion's not the daily round. The business is very unholy; it's about oil, narcotics, guns, women, glory, and loot. (108)
Many software merchants made the profound mistake of selling the best software they could make. Luckily, a study of strategies for information pricing had made it clear that this was not the best source of revenue in a true Information Economy. People became nervous and unhappy if they were sold decent software at a decent price. Decent software should only be offered at a terrifically high, premium price, and loaded down with extras and unnecessary but psychologically reassuring bells and whistles. Then, the middle tier of the market should be offered a cheaper, but still expensive, crippled version of the original software. And newbies and students and bottom feeders, in their many sorry thousands, were to be sold a barely functional, piece-of-shit, value-subtracted version of the product. (288)