It is scary: The food that fuels me is more expensive than buying the technologies I could dream of owning as a kid on the used market, where I can get large monitors and 10 year old computers nearly for free. Organically grown stuff is now more expensive than the most sophisticated technological creations. The wonderful visual representation of the study “Global human-made mass exceeds all living Biomass” on anthropomass.org by Emily Elhacham, Liad Ben Uri, Jonathan Grozovski, Yinon M. Bar-On and Ron Milo conclude that the human created anthropogenic mass to which technology belongs now exceeds all living biomass.
Growing up at the age of 10 my first computer was powered by an even back then antique 800 MHz Pentium III processor, 128 MB of RAM and a 13 GB extremely noisy hard drive and it still baffles me, that those tiny slabs inside our pockets that are controlling our lives today are far more powerful than that machine, still I appreciate how much this computer was a portal to other worlds that served as a tool for creative expression and inspiration, when life was limited by being a child in a small town. Without internet connection I felt forced to create my own local version of the internet which resulted in the creation of my first website that visually (not functionally) resembled Google with Word as the tool of choice which was linked to other HTML pages. Also I vividly remember the excitement me and my sister had to wake up early at 6 on the weekends just to build imaginary worlds in PowerPoint for the iconic Microsoft Office assistant Clippy who hopefully enjoyed living in them. Having a computer like this required a lot of creativity to squeeze as much life out of it as possible.
Outdated machines provide constraints that can nourish creativity in unexpected ways: While my modern computer hosts (of course legally obtained) software more expensive than my net-worth and provides endless opportunity, writing texts with limited workstations allow for greater focus and a higher chance of getting into the flow state. Internationally renowned authors like George RR Martin prefers using a DOS-computer just to focus, while other professional writers use vintage typewriters just for the same sake. Using a vintage computer is in many ways the same like driving a vintage car: From a contemporary perspective you start appreciating the elegance in the scarce old, the higher simplicity and purity of the technology allows for deeper hands-on learning experience, while providing insights into the principles of the logic that makes computers work.
In tech there is always this one generation of computers that gets thrown away, until there are so many lost of one generation that they get valuable again. Replicating my childhood setup is now a dirty and expensive process. The computer I have used 15 years ago would now fetch prices from 150€ upwards with the sky as the limit and the rise in prices seems not to stop. Yet a machine that old holds so much nostalgic value as a time-capsule for many and could provide so much insight to younger generations, that the computers that are useless for you now may be worth conserving. Before you throw a computer away please consider gifting it to someone else, who sees the value in it that you may not see. The shiny tech of today will be the old tech of tomorrow and the cycle will always continue. For many people outdated computers are just space-wasters, for others those are nearly free learning resources and hopefully portals to joyful worlds of unlimited exploration!
Recommend read: anthropomass.org – an example of beautiful data representation and a sneak peak on posts that are coming to your screen in the near future
& if you are curious what happened to Clippy, read this article
