While writing the foreword to the very book that you hold in your hands, something preposterous happened:
A picture, very likely not painted by Renaissance master Leonardo Da Vinci, sold at auction for 450 million US dollars, thus jeopardizing my entire plan for this piece. Because up until this moment, the printer—specifically, in my opinion, the at-home inkjet printer—was the single object most emblematic of man’s folly, of his casual, unwitting cruelty to himself and to his fellow man.
In 2011, the gross domestic product of the island nation Tonga was 439 million USD.
Consider the printer.
It is a machine that delivers on exactly the opposite of the promise of the Information Age. And it is therefore the truest manifestation of the era.
From the very start, the promise of the personal computing revolution was two-fold: all the world’s knowledge at one’s fingertips, and streamlined communication for both personal and professional reasons. And as soon as there were personal computers, there were printers, fucking things all up, taking two giant leaps back for every one step forward we took into the future.
Putting what computers worked so hard to digitize back, needlessly, into the physical world.
“So you mean to tell me,” you might have asked the clerk at CompUSA in 1999, “that now I can fill out this medical form entirely, as you say, ‘online?’”
“Oh, no,” he’d have told you, sagely shaking his head. “Digitally signing things won’t be hot in these streets for at least another 10 years.”
“So I—”
“What you can do now, here, in 1999, is you can print out a copy of the medical form from your email, sign it, and send it back to them. But in order to do that, you’ll need one of these hellish 3-in-1 machines.” He would have turned then on the heel of his all-black sneaker, and, with a flourish, gestured—as though revealing from behind an imaginary curtain—at several of these printers with the flatbed scanners bolted to the top and made by companies like Lexmark, Canon, and Epson.
“I understand that it prints and scans. What’s the third function?”
“Copying or faxing, probably, but I can’t be certain. No one has ever attempted either.”
It didn’t matter then and it doesn’t matter now, because the fact remains that, on top of a filing cabinet, or in the side table in some corner of literally every home office in the world, there squats one of these insane devices. Soldiering away. Taking virtual content from computers, and making documents that resemble that content using ink that squirts out of little tanks and paper and dozens of little gears and servos all designed with planned obsolescence in mind. Little skeuomorph factories, immovable objects, always ignored, and in constant need of maintenance.
Copyright © 2018 by Blue Star Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
