Digital vs analog, smooth vs coarse: human vs non.

After the night's rain showers the day breaks on Memorial Day, the Monday of the 3-day holiday weekend late in May. Rather than wait for the annual neighborhood waste collection (and electronic waste) day, somebody on this street has left the unwanted equipment at the curb as a signal that anybody can claim this, whether it is functioning or not. On sunny days it bakes, on rainy days it feels the wet.

This computer monitor is a pinnacle of human ingenuity, built from generations of high-level mathematics, materials engineering, design expertise, manufacturing and supply chains, along with the electrical engineering prowess. But seeing it juxtaposed by millennia of grass biology, rooted in its terrain and following the rhythm of the surrounding season prompts reflections about the contrast of digital thinking (all/nothing, on/off, zero/one, black/white; context mostly ignored) to the earlier and coexisting analog way (all parts connected by layers of webs; context is the foundation).

Consonant with the idea of hubris, of human overconfidence in one's own skill or the invincibility of technological solutions to any obstacle or threat, this image poses the question: will human economic activity extract life and value from the rest of the planet until, finally, human society disappears; or, instead, will humans find the ways to limit harm and impulses of advancing personal advantage at the expense of fellow humans and to the habitats of air, land, and sea where other living things exist. Excesses of extraction from natural resources, excesses of production and price reductions, and excesses of consumption (use then discard) lead to scenes like this photo: unwanted or superseded possessions littering the edge of one's property for others to claim for reuse, repair, recycling, or repurposing before the things or its leftover parts finally arrive at the final resting place (solid-waste landfill).

In the first generation of personal computers, the equipment was relatively rare, expensive, and well-cared for. Now entering the third generation of new PC users, the computing power, memory cost, and purposes that software can be applied to is much different. Universities and other knowledge-intensive sites of human activity have established 4 or 5-year rotation cycles to replace perfectly functional old equipment with new editions, so quickly do the advances eclipse the older models, much as predicted by Moore's Law. For early adopter's of home computing to see a sleek LCD monitor discarded casually like this would be astounding. By imagining a time 25 years from now with all the PC advances that go along with the passing years, perhaps even more astounding sights at the edge of streets will greet the viewer.