Vintage Post-Humans

from Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon), 1902

...I don't know if this technically counts as post-human, but in 1902, the idea of going to the moon seemed less achievable than the idea of cyborgs does to us.

cover of I, Robot by Isaac Asimov first published in 1950

Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968

The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951

The sewing machine...a technology very near and dear to my heart. Over 50 years and 5 different people went into its invention, but it was all collated and patented by Isaac Merrit Singer in 1851...this made the other 4 guys whose ideas he had borrowed start suing him, leading to a series of lawsuits known as the Sewing Machine War, which finally ended in 1856, when they all pooled their patents and created the entity that became the first modern sewing machine. It, when combined with the various patents that had been granted for industrial looms about 50 years previously, revolutionized mass clothing production, and was one of the key components of the industrial revolution. Pre-made clothing was no longer just for people who could afford to go to tailors and dress-makers, and millions of jobs were created in the textile and clothing production factories.

According to Marshall Mcluhan, the famed media theorist, this would be an example of an enhancement of the original 'sewing' technology. And while it drove out the necessity for dressmakers and tailors, it also, in a strange way, enhanced their value by narrowing their clientele (the people who would have seen mass-produced clothing as a degradation). Today, we hold people who can make their own clothes and make clothes for others quite highly, but it is a novelty, rather than a skill necessary to the survival of themselves and their family. Mothers now don't generally teach their daughters how to sew as soon as they can sit up, because there is no real need, so, when speaking in absolutes, there is no real need for the skill of a seamstress any longer.

So what did it bring back? One could argue that with the sewing machine was a leveler, and once a person has a sewing machine, they have the ability to produce any type of clothing, therefore clothing rises above class and race, and the fact that a woman has a fancy dress isn't necessarily synonymous with wealth. This, to a utopian idealist would indicate a 'return to how it used to be' when humans were free of such superficial labels as clothing and hairstyles.

Now we have the labels written directly on the massed produced clothing...since you really can't tell a Banana Republic white t-shirt from a Wal-Mart white t-shirt unless the names are written on the tag. So, the immediacy and accessibility the sewing machine originally intended has morphed into another divide, where wealthy people shop at Banana Republic and poor people buy their clothes at Wal-Mart (obviously a generalisation), and clothing has reverted to an immediate indicator of status.

Those Good Old Days

It's strange to think that when I have kids there will be things from my childhood-even my young adulthood-that will be completely phased out of our society. In my lifetime, our family has gone from having a record player and a cassette player for our chief sources of music to each one of us having iPods holding the contents of our entire record/cassette collection and much, much more. I actually heard myself saying to a young girl at the library that I work at over the summer: (we were listening to a book-on-CD, and she was complaining how long it took to jump through the CD to find the place we left off) and I said "I remember when you had to fast forward and rewind cassette tapes, that took forever.”

Then I laughed to myself…I sounded just like my mom telling us about 8-track tapes. The difference? My mom and I are 30 years apart. That girl (Jackson, is her name) and I are 11 years apart. That’s a pretty mind-blowing acceleration in the advancing in everyday technology.

I got to thinking about that when I was searching my memory for the first interaction with technology…because the first thing that came to mind was this: I remember when a little cluster of green, brown and peach colored pixels (with two black dots for eyes and a red dot for a mouth) on the screen kept me and my family occupied for hours.

I’m talking, of course, about Nintendo’s “Legend of Zelda” the first installment of a series of games that has spanned over twenty years and Nintendo game systems. Now, I’m not a serious gamer by any means…an occasional game-binger is a more appropriate title…I get in moods, usually over the summer, where I’ll play through games in a week or two. But it isn’t a family affair like it was when I was little.

In fact, I didn’t really play very much when I was that young, but I remember sitting in the living room of my aunt and uncle’s house (probably late 1991), with the two of them and my mom and dad all trying to get through the dungeons…and, as any Zelda follower will tell you, the original NES game is still the hardest one.

It was a family affair, not regulated merely to the ‘kids’ or the ‘geeks’ and it wasn’t considered wasting a night playing video games or sitting on the couch getting fat, either. It was a toy, meant to be played with when you were done with work, or on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

And it was challenging. It seems completely alien to us to think of not having an internet access point within a couple of feet wherever we go, but there was no looking up of game maps online, and no cheats to be found in the 8-bit game cartridge. So, my uncle was the cartographer, who drew each dungeon map out in a little notepad (for the next time he played through the game) and made notes on hidden passages, heart containers, etc.

Talking about the good old days…it’s something I find myself doing more and more with the kids I see everyday at work. It’s something I think every kid promises themselves they won’t ever do…but I’m realizing more and more that when our parents did it to us, they weren’t actually trying to annoy us or bore us to tears talking about Five and Dime stores and typewriters, they were trying to keep their memory of those things alive, both in themselves and in their children.