It's odd how design trends for technology have ended up focusing on
shiny materials and perfect clean lines. Working on used laptops,
one easily appreciates how these design decisions lead to the cases
of such devices becoming so easily soiled by fingerprints, trapped
bits of skin/food, and scratches. Getting these things out of the
factory looking so pristine is a sort of challenge that
manufacturers seem to like setting themselves. By selling
technology products, some new and some used, I get caught up in
this and fear any little cosmetic blemish. Even with the packaging,
things should look clean, sharp, and unsullied. Everything should
ideally have the same identical, perfect, complexion.
But this whole attitude only exists due to mechanised production.
Back in the days when many common products were still produced
locally by hand, by people such as blacksmiths, there was no
possibility for this sort of consistency in such products. There
was intrinsically a human element to the character of the final
creation, deviating from the original conception. This is still
celebrated with hand-made wares, but they are only a minority and
strictly excluded from the realm of technology which has by its own
nature emerged entinely within the context of machine-manufactured
goods.
So technology products are expected to look perfect, according to
their design, and whereas initially work was invested into textured
paints, surfaces, patterns, and colours that hide dirt and marks,
now we have this trend towards entirely impractical surfaces and
colours. Apple are obviously much to blame, entirely branding
themselves around a pure, shiny, white that will reveal the
slightest marks. This exists because it can be made through
precisely controlled and automated production processes, but there
is a glaring contradiction to these design approaches in that the
devices are still to be used by humans in the end.
So you end up with me scrubbing, wiping, picking, away the bits of
humanity from these once perfect products. Handling carefully to
avoid leaving an ugly fingerprint, entrapping a stray hair, or
causing one more tiny scratch. I don't dislike this though, I enjoy
it. I crave the obsession of turning this item sullied by humanity
back into a model of the pristine design it originally replicated.
Tearing out these unclean remnants of humanity which have infested
it over the years. Bringing it beyond dirty human organics back
firmly into the artificial world of manufactured goods.
It's not just other people's filth I feel this way about though, I
feel quite the same when I intensely clean my own stuff, if I find
the excuse to do so. Yet like most things I also like doing this
cleaning naked - sitting there as one big organic hulk, slowly
expelling skin, hairs, sweat, snot, perhaps the slight smell of
piss or even semen from my penis, and there I am working away with
my hands to precisely clean away from this single object all signs
of ever having seen such filth, as if I were presenting it to some
superior being. It's completely absurd.
It's not that I care much about touching dirty things, be it gunked
up oily/greasy parts of my car, dirt that I'm digging, or animals
and stuff they've been pooing over. But I have in my mind this lust
for perfect clean things that goes beyond practical hygine. I think
this attitude is probably taught to us, maybe for good reason as
part of maintaining a clean environment for one's self, but it's
also exploited by manufacturers of these devices who bring them to
us looking so perfect only because nobody has actually used them
yet.
We lust over these things that are cleaner than our own use of them
permits. People buy these crisp new creations because it gives them
an illusion. The people these devices are designed for wrap
themselves in fashionable clothes and sculpt they bodies to match a
media image, then hold up a brand new iPhone and there they are, no
longer a human but a model themselves of what they've seen in
photos. Because in a photo they don't eat, shed, sweat, piss, poo,
they are the perfectly designed beings that match their perfectly
designed device. Those are the beings that these devices are made
to be used by, not humans.
