Bruce Sterling’s “Meet the Spime” article seriously blows my
mind. I was super confused when I was first reading, but it totally makes sense
towards the end. It’s something I truly never even thought about. This section
out of that whole article was the one that fascinated me the most because my
friends and I are avid wine drinkers; and I never would have even thought about
this.
“For instance, when I described that “bottle of wine” a while
ago, everybody presumably knew that I meant a particular, coherent object. Yet
that “bottle of wine” was a momentary congelation of material and energy flows.
It has now become nameless, but it remains a process, still pre-bottle and
post-bottle underway and mostly unknowable to me. That “bottle of wine” was
once sunlight on Italian earth, lakes of grape juice, yeast in fermentation
tanks, wood pulp for the label, colored inks, cork from Spain or maybe
Portugal, plus a Californian grocery chain reacting to consumer trends and
stocking a brand with some shelf appeal. Then I found it, bought it and
consumed it. It continued as a dissociated flow of recyclable glass, consumed
paper, hydrating fluids and a narcotic in my bloodstream, long since
metabolized. When I bought that “bottle of wine” I was also financing a
situation that names and defines those complex flows as a “bottle of wine”—a
technosocial set-up that allows me to interact with that object as a consumer
item first and only, blindly uninvolved with its extensive history as pre-bottle
and post-bottle. Buying and drinking it was my own business, and the rest of it
is none of my business. How much of that business ought to be mine?”
I especially didn’t realize this was barcoding. I know
barcodes exist because that’s how we scan products to inventory and for
pricing. That’s also how we keep track of our inventory and how we ring up
products for customers to buy, but while I was reading the passage about wine
the word barcode didn’t even pop into my head. I definitely didn’t think of
autonomy. I’m not even sure I 100% know what autonomy is or how it relates to
barcoding. Here are a couple of links describing autonomy and barcoding:
Yeah with almost every reading I am confused at first, but when we are in class and I gett other perspectives I thing start to piece together. As far as spimes, the idea of some of the aspects of the spime have been used. Products such as Nike+ products and today's QR codes. This article may seem old because it is a bit outdated but the ideas behind what the potential of spimes are interesting. I would like to see what they can and will do with these types of technology in the near future.
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