Amputee

In a week or so, UPS will be delivering to me from New Jersey a package containing a circa 1998 IBM ThinkPad 600E laptop, which weighs some five pounds and boasts a Pentium II processor clocking in at about 233 megahertz. Its harddrive has no more than four gigabytes of space, and it comes equipped with Windows 2000, which will likely consume a considerable amount of its mere 128 megabytes of random access memory. It is a clunky, sturdy machine built of strong, composite plastics, one of IBM's most popular models to date. I bought this machine, because, dissatisfied with my current laptop, which is too powerful, too large, and too much like a very small desktop, I wanted something more portable, a "work" computer.

For some time, I considered my hand at the "netbook" craze -- pared-down laptops that sacrifice power for portability and convenience. As the name suggests, these machines are designed with the explicit intention of allowing their owners to maintain a constant connection to the Internet, be they in their homes, at work, in the park, in a cafe, on a train, or wherever. They are sleek, light, small, and cosmetically attractive. Moreover, they provide the tantalizing possibility to own something distinctively of the twenty-first century for but two to three hundred dollars. Netbooks have already begun and will undoubtedly continue to rival the glowing acrilic logos of the Mac Appletoshes in independent bookstores and street-corner coffee shops.

But then I realized that the purpose of a "work" computer is to facilitate the accomplishment of work, and I began to wonder if a netbook truly suited this purpose. While their low price and modern sleekness were appealling, the fact is that I can get very little done before once again melting into the cloud -- obsessively checking email, refreshing web sites, reading newsfeeds, checking blogs, visiting "social" centers like Reddit and Facebook. The notion of network neurosis is hardly new; it has been a punch-line since at least the advent of electronic mail. But the Cloud pulls the mind to shreds like cosmic entropy: one shuttles through the Internet, gazing at a procession of sights and sounds, so different from television not only in its interactivity, but because one knows that, out there, there are other people doing the same thing, that the very sites before one's eyes were created, as is often the case, by individuals, that each one is a strange work of art with human character -- and this very word, 'site', allows us to believe (and perhaps it is true) that the Internet is fundamentally a space ('cyberspace') that we can inhabit and travel, even as we sit in our chairs at our desks. But it is also time, and time lost.

All of these observations have been made before; the difference between now and 1992, to arbitrarily pick an incipient date, is that, while before these observations where predictions, projections, interpolations, and hypotheticals, now they are incontrovertibly true. The cliched image of the endless dark room of cubicles full of modern drones before glowing green terminals, this image that we always imagine as distant and dystopian, has only served to hide the fact that, taking away the bookshelves, tables, windows, paintings, trees, and people of our physical surroundings, we are in fact already living, and have been doing so for some time, without even realizing it, within cyberspace.

So, instead of buying a "netbook," I bought, for sixty dollars, an eleven year-old laptop, barely functional -- but enough for word-processing, and with a USB drive for file transfering -- in order to attempt to mitigate against this fact. It constitutes my first step in disconnecting myself from the Cloud; though, obviously, one, perhaps two or three little wires will always remain atached.

The IBM ThinkPad 600E is a glorious machine, not least of all because it is so impractical in the year 2008, so very obsolete, but also because it still maintains with it that old conception of computing, the "work" computer. Today, a computer is not a machine, it is a limb; computers have been incorporated fully into human life. We only notice that it is a machine when it ceases to function in some way, when the harddrive fails or when the monitor cracks; just as, it should be said, we only notice the fragility of our bodies, our biological machines, when an organ shuts down or a bone breaks. At all other times it is simply there as a part of our lives, like a nose that smells or an opposable thumb that holds. It comes with us where we go; it goes to "sleep" at night; it takes naps. It is warm; we can feel its heat beneath our wrists. It breathes with fans for lungs, distributing cool air in much the way our own bodies distribute hot blood.

But this black box of an instrument that is the IBM ThinkPad 600E is so obviously a piece of equipment, like a notebook or a ledger, a ruler or a hammer. In fact, I wanted something even more ostentatious than this model, at first. I looked into vintage Apple products, even Texas Instruments laptops, old computers made by companies one wouldn't even imagine. The more robotic they looked, with hard, inhuman edges and grey coats of paint, the better. I wanted something that seemed out of place and unnatural, something self-consciously a computer, not a seemless "peripheral" to my organism. I settled on the IBM ThinkPad 600E for a number of reasons -- price, functionality, ease-of-use -- but most of all for the very practical reason that its replacement batteries are still relatively inexpensive.

It will arrive in a few days. When it does, I will close my Acer Aspire 5672WLMi, which is hardly a cosmetic prize, but which serves far too well, not with its bells and whistles -- if only it had bells and whistles, like a 1950s robot! -- but as an appendage, and I will put it away, not "asleep" but turned off, until I need it again to perform basic functions like the checking of electronic mail, the reading of news, and other forms of communication.

Then will begin my amputation.

(Perhaps in any future reflection on this matter, I will have to address the irony of writing about it on a web log, and of having purchased my IBM ThinkPad 600E on eBay using PayPal and a credit card from an anonymous man -- well, not anonymous: Joe Birnbaum writing from Victoria Birnbaum's email account -- in New Jersey.)