March 1, 2004
Walking on glass. I've been home since Friday (see below), so I wondered if it was just my block. Evidently not. It appears that much of New York City is strewn with AOL CDs that have fallen out of those bundles of the Village Voice which you see being distributed for free from street-corner bins. Recalling that distant time when a CD seemed like something miraculous and valuable, Anil Dash observes:The overwhelming message that's been communicated to me by the sheer unrelentingly perverse ubiquity of this sort of promotion is essentially "Our Service Is Worthless". Maybe it's just my perception of things, but any product you're willing to associate with smashed bits of plastic strewn about the streets of a major metropolis is not exactly nurturing an upscale image. I keep waiting for a murder of end-times crows to swarm and circle, picking up the shiny bits of aluminum that line the curbs.[08:45 AM]I'm not inventing anything by noting that AOL CDs suck and are worthless, of course. There's nothing new about them being ugly. I suppose it's a compelling ugliness, at least. We all knew that after the apocalpyse it'd just be cockroaches and televangelists and some militia members camped out in bomb shelters in Montana. But I have yet to see a sci-fi writer who correctly predicted that the twentyfirst century would come along and we'd all be literally walking on discarded piles of digital recordings that promised us the ability to instantly connect with anyone in the world, free of charge. But hey, whadaya know. I've got mail.