Brendon J. Wilson | Page 173 | www.brendonwilson.com

October 7, 2002April 28, 2012 by Brendon J. Wilson

Pave the Earth

This weekend, while channel-surfing in a vain attempt to pretend I’m doing something instead of procrastinating, I came across a program on Stephen Ibbot, a visual artist from Toronto. Wow. What a load of crappy crap crap.

Stephen puts together abstract images on his computer using a simple paint program and transforms the drawing into a painting. Whoopee. The drawings, while interesting for a four year old, can hardly be described as art. Then again, maybe I just don’t “get it”. The works have been described as “visually stimulating”. Oh, they’re stimulating alright. I can feel the back of my throat prepping to be stimulated at the tops of my lungs.

The art reminds me of the book Son of Interflux in which one of the characters, a failure of an art student, decides that his total lack of artistic ability shouldn’t prevent him from being an artist. He finally finds his niche in a branch of art that involves dipping bananas in paint and running them through a fan onto a canvas, or passing high-voltage electricity through pumpkins. Yah! Art!

Even worse is listening to art critics as they attempt to describe this visual drivel in intellectual terms. Are they really buying this stuff, or are they just trying to sound smart? It reminds me of Steve Martin’s comments in LA Story:

Steve Martin: And look at the way he’s holding her, it’s almost…pornographic!

(Camera cuts to a large abstract painting, predominantly red)

When I see this kind of pompous self-indulgence, I can’t help but get mad. Somewhere, someone is dying of malnutrition, of going without, and here we are, lavishing praise on some “artist” who’s managing to sell us some cock-and-bull story. Let’s be honest: this is a con.

While I’d like to protect people against this, the worst kind of hucksterism, I sometimes wonder: why bother? In my mind, this con-artistry (the only kind of art involved here) is no different from that employed by Enron, the tobacco industry, or anyone else that exploits other people’s ignorance. Why don’t I just join the party? Take advantage of the suckers out there and get rich in the process? Pave the Earth for a profit while I’m at it!

But I can’t.

Will this inability to rape and pillage the weak spell doom for my hopes of creating a successful company?

October 3, 2002June 10, 2012 by Brendon J. Wilson

Fix Me!

As a kid, I delighted in “fixing” my parent’s watches, radios, and various household electronics, gleefully unscrewing the backs, bottoms and sides of anything that dared to attempt to hide its inner secrets from my prying eyes. Most of the time, these efforts turned into frantic cover-up operations, the evidence destroyed, and innocent eyes turned to their highest “gee, I haven’t seen that for a long time, guess you lost it” setting.

Obviously, these efforts weren’t true attempts at repair. However, it does illustrate a difference between then and now. It used to be that if a device you owned broke down, you could open it up, swirl a screwdriver around inside, close it, and have a better than zero chance that the device would start working again. Like my childhood experiments, whether you actually fixed it through the exercise of skill or chance remained another matter entirely.

Try fixing anything you buy today. Hell, try even getting it opened.

Go to any pawn shop in your city and you’re guaranteed to find a camera from the depths of photographic history that’s at least 70 years old and, surprisingly, still accepts standard 35mm film. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. But, chances are, you can fix the camera yourself with a little care, a search on the Internet and a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers. Try to do the same thing with your 3.1 megapixel digital camera when a stray cosmic or gamma ray wanders into the camera’s CPU and fries a connection that’s thinner than the hairs on a human hair’s head.

Gazing into my crystal bowl of alphabet soup, I can foresee your camera’s future: do the letters S, O, and L mean anything to you?

When my parent’s bought our first computer, an Apple II clone called the Franklin Ace 1000, it came with schematics. Actual schematics. If anything went wrong, you at least had the option of sauntering down to RadioShack, grabbing some spare components, and spending the evening burning yourself with a soldering iron while attempting to cram a capacitor into a space marked C12 on the motherboard. Fast forward to now, where companies like Sony make crappy products and won’t even give you the schematics.

The hermetic sealing of devices we bought and we own by their manufacturers is a cunning strategy by corporations to leverage “Consumer Lock-In” (uh-oh, there’s another one of those business terms). Essentially, you no longer own the products they buy, they own you. The most chilling example in the news lately has been the use of proprietary computer systems in cars. Independent mechanics are being squeezed out by car manufacturers, who refuse to release the specifications for these systems. If you want to diagnose a GM car, you have to buy the GM diagnostic tools. Ditto Ford.

Are we putting ourselves at risk through this intellectual property hoarding? We should probably look to history to see what can happen. Proprietary file formats, hardware, software, and interfaces are all reducing the economies of scale and scope, dividing up our technological and cultural heritage. One has to wonder sometimes if the Amish might have the right idea.