Our Marvelous Corporate Improvement Machine

WE THE HUMAN SPECIES are making progress like never before, in nearly every area of human endeavor. On the planet mars, the small car roving around named "Curiosity", or something like that, is taking pictures of fascinating, mysterious objects, life is being extended  with computers, micro surgery, and miracle drugs, and we have more knowledge than ever. 

I no longer collect books. I haven't maintained a personal library since 1986, the year of my father's death, when i gave away all his books and all my books in honor of him, knowing that computers would replace books soon enough anyhow.

I predicted thirty years ago that books on paper would become obsolete, and in 1995 i got in trouble in an american high school library for telling a class that paper libraries were obsolete. The librarian was not pleased.

And of course i was right, both times. Books on paper are now indeed obsolete, and it is charming and quaint the way people are clinging to them, refusing to give them up, to let them go. So it looks like they'll be around for awhile.

Everytime i suggest to someone that paper books are obsolete because of computer books the person gets upset about it, and tries to argue. emotional attachments die hard, like bruce willis. I love books msyelf, but am very glad i no longer collect them, because if i did, by now i would have thousands, and the burden of caring for them. instead, i have my computer, for which i have been waiting, i now realize, my entire life.

First, i colleted 33 1/3  and 45 RPM vinyl records, then i collected eight track tapes.. when the world went to cassettes, i stopped, and i never collected anything again, no MP3's, nothing. Similarly, I do not want to buy a big screen TV, then get a slightly better one, then another, and so on. Big screen TV upgrading is a scam, of sorts, is it not? A clever one, admittedly.

We'll keep fueling the corporate machine which bestows upon us the blessings of all these advancements and improvements, the corporate machine shall keep giving us all these marvelous blessings, and we'll all live happily ever after.