Junk-ism, cellphones and my well-traveled PC.

In La Paz, Bolivia, there is an open market just for bartering and exchanging used goods. I give you my used pen, you give me your used lighter. And then you can exchange that lighter next week, or next day, for -say- some pliers. And on and on.

Today the Times ran this article about the new usages people around the world are finding for their good ol' regular cellphone. Having no cash to spare, and no readily available broadband, people are inventing new ways of keeping their cellphones 'cutting edge'.

The idea is not about having something new, but about getting out the most of what you already have. This is not a philosophy, this is the way things are in most of the developing world. You just don't buy the iPad (a devise people still don't know how they might be able to use) or the latest cellphones, or a new car, or the upgraded iShit, just because you can, you simply extract the most juice out of what you already have.

I guess I had that frame of mind when I bought a PC and beat the crap out of it for 9 years. I juiced, pressed, exploited, re-wired, put more RAM, a new-but-used hard-disk, and eventually just plainly canibalized that computer. There are still parts lying around the basement, this past weekend the speakers from that Jurassic PC provided the soundtrack for my backyard's Spring cleaning.

That computer of mine, at the beginning I used it even as an answering machine, radio-receiver, wrote my thesis there, my wife wrote her thesis there; 'it' lived in Quebec, Montreal, Williamsburg, Fort Green and the South Bronx, at one point the poor thing was just a fax machine...but I kept it. Because I could still manage to get something out of it.

However, it is not only about keeping what you already have. It is about finding new uses for it. It is a parallel growth of usages, instead of the use and replace paradigm. You have something really existing, a thing, in the world; for example, a cellphone, but instead of adding more cellphones or 'better' cellphones, you try NOT to keep on giving birth to new phones endlessly, and hence adding more crap, more stuff, more junk, to our world, but rather invent new uses for the stuff that already exists.

I guess that I am trying to organize some kind of techno-environmental thoughts in here, but some philosophical ideas are also begging to be heard....and so, I will stop and continue later. This will be a multi-post micro-project.