While contemplating if it’s my fate to lose my mind, I just bought a Strongspace account to do online backups of my files when I’m in Hong Kong. My most important data is now mirrored in six different spots:
- on my laptop;
- on my home server (the laptop syncs to it every night);
- on the server’s secondary hard drive (the main hard drive syncs to it every morning);
- on my iPod (which syncs whenever it gets plugged in);
- on an iMac at university (which syncs with the iPod whenever I’m at my desk and without my laptop);
- online at Strongspace.
Only last week I told my friends in my postgrad office that the ideology of hypertext, the Internet and contemporary computing in general has inherited Project Xanadu’s quixotic desperation to avoid loss — to never forget anything; a kind of suture to maintain the integrity of one’s own subjectivity. Looking at my own manias, I can now only laugh.
[ tags: backups, loss, strongspace, xanadu ]
I find myself in the state of precarious labour; only owning one very old computer with a dodgy hard-drive, with no laptop, no ipod. Yet working on issues of new media and contemporary computer culture. I have promised myself that should I ever be able to afford a laptop, I will etch “Does Equipment Empower The Elite?” into the frame of the screen to remind me that the provisions and manias of information labour are essentially luxury items and status symbols. “I’m doing something”, I used to say. But without a blog, who knows anymore, perhaps I don’t?
It’s pop psychology, but it also goes without saying that tinkering with expensive toys is (at least on one level) a power fantasy on an embarrassingly petty scale! Mmmmm…