FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS

It's odd how design trends for technology have ended up focusing on 
shiny materials and perfect clean lines. Working on used laptops, 
one easily appreciates how these design decisions lead to the cases 
of such devices becoming so easily soiled by fingerprints, trapped 
bits of skin/food, and scratches. Getting these things out of the 
factory looking so pristine is a sort of challenge that 
manufacturers seem to like setting themselves. By selling 
technology products, some new and some used, I get caught up in 
this and fear any little cosmetic blemish. Even with the packaging, 
things should look clean, sharp, and unsullied. Everything should 
ideally have the same identical, perfect, complexion.

But this whole attitude only exists due to mechanised production. 
Back in the days when many common products were still produced 
locally by hand, by people such as blacksmiths, there was no 
possibility for this sort of consistency in such products. There 
was intrinsically a human element to the character of the final 
creation, deviating from the original conception. This is still 
celebrated with hand-made wares, but they are only a minority and 
strictly excluded from the realm of technology which has by its own 
nature emerged entinely within the context of machine-manufactured 
goods.

So technology products are expected to look perfect, according to 
their design, and whereas initially work was invested into textured 
paints, surfaces, patterns, and colours that hide dirt and marks, 
now we have this trend towards entirely impractical surfaces and 
colours. Apple are obviously much to blame, entirely branding 
themselves around a pure, shiny, white that will reveal the 
slightest marks. This exists because it can be made through 
precisely controlled and automated production processes, but there 
is a glaring contradiction to these design approaches in that the 
devices are still to be used by humans in the end.

So you end up with me scrubbing, wiping, picking, away the bits of 
humanity from these once perfect products. Handling carefully to 
avoid leaving an ugly fingerprint, entrapping a stray hair, or 
causing one more tiny scratch. I don't dislike this though, I enjoy 
it. I crave the obsession of turning this item sullied by humanity 
back into a model of the pristine design it originally replicated. 
Tearing out these unclean remnants of humanity which have infested 
it over the years. Bringing it beyond dirty human organics back 
firmly into the artificial world of manufactured goods.

It's not just other people's filth I feel this way about though, I 
feel quite the same when I intensely clean my own stuff, if I find 
the excuse to do so. Yet like most things I also like doing this 
cleaning naked - sitting there as one big organic hulk, slowly 
expelling skin, hairs, sweat, snot, perhaps the slight smell of 
piss or even semen from my penis, and there I am working away with 
my hands to precisely clean away from this single object all signs 
of ever having seen such filth, as if I were presenting it to some 
superior being. It's completely absurd.

It's not that I care much about touching dirty things, be it gunked 
up oily/greasy parts of my car, dirt that I'm digging, or animals 
and stuff they've been pooing over. But I have in my mind this lust 
for perfect clean things that goes beyond practical hygine. I think 
this attitude is probably taught to us, maybe for good reason as 
part of maintaining a clean environment for one's self, but it's 
also exploited by manufacturers of these devices who bring them to 
us looking so perfect only because nobody has actually used them 
yet.

We lust over these things that are cleaner than our own use of them 
permits. People buy these crisp new creations because it gives them 
an illusion. The people these devices are designed for wrap 
themselves in fashionable clothes and sculpt they bodies to match a 
media image, then hold up a brand new iPhone and there they are, no 
longer a human but a model themselves of what they've seen in 
photos. Because in a photo they don't eat, shed, sweat, piss, poo, 
they are the perfectly designed beings that match their perfectly 
designed device. Those are the beings that these devices are made 
to be used by, not humans.

 - The Free Thinker