the timboucher experience

A couple nights ago, I dropped my Seagate external hard drive off about a four foot drop to a hardwood floor in an effort to get more comfortable with my laptop (for which I have no speakers) while watching some Twin Peaks episodes. Shortly into the marathon - perfect this time of year - the video and audio came out of sync and became progressively worse. The outer casing of the device showed no scratches, dents or other signs of wear. It wasn’t a straight fall, as it was cushioned by a mess of wires sticking out of a gangbox and the fact that the USB cord connected to it to my mothership-laptop. Regardless, I decided to restart my computer, turn off, un-plug, re-connect and re-power every piece of hardware associated with it. This tends to solve about 85% of all computer problems. And when it doesn’t is when that sinking feeling starts to set in. This notion that you’re about to be thrown into an existential crisis over the loss of five thousand songs, half a dozen movies and a few dozen episodes of television shows. Sure, somewhere mixed in there is actual data of my own, things I’ve created, art, resume back-ups, music recordings. But I almost mourn the loss of the things that aren’t mine - and the ways they’ve allowed me to feel, the associations I’ve formed between these ephemeral electrical artifacts and emotional-mental states within my own being.

Now I’m looking through forums, combing the web for other potential solutions to catastrophic human data failure. I’m surprisingly calm, pleasingly zen, about the whole thing. But I’m not taking the nihilist approach either, just giving up on my data completely. I’m trying to take the Realist’s Path: let’s open this thing up, take a look at it, tinker and experiment and see if we (me and the machine) can’t come to some kind of understanding on a purely personal level. Discuss this like reasonable beings.

Of course, on the back of the device is a familiar label: no user serviceable parts inside. Fucking around with this will void your warranty.

I’ve been reading stories about people more spiritually connected to their dataspectre who just can’t afford to let go. Seagate asks $700 at the low end for data retrieval. So sayeth the internet, anyway.

Maybe it’s the science-fiction writer in me, but this all has me in a futuristic mood. Take this and push the trend down the line of time towards increasing complexity: people literally storing perceptual feeds (live video and audio recordings which follow them their whole lives) into an off-site (non-local) storage facility. A storage facility made up of fallible human-built hardware run by fallible humans saving what’s certain to become our most precious commodity: human experience & memory.

When your entire personality is being copied and uploaded every so often, what happens when your hardware fails? What happens when your technicians suck, make a mistake and can erase someone’s entire existence from the Akashic Annals of Cybespace™?

This is why I figure, if not now, then maybe for those yet to be born: open that box, void that warranty. Figure out how to make it work and share your results with all the other real humans out there. And stop buying products from companies who mechanically, physically, electronically, programmatically or otherwise attempt to punish, reprimand or invalidate the consumer-user in any way shape or form. Expect change. Encourage innovation. Channel challenges. Rebuild, repeat.

• Dumb Terminals
• Ancestral Storage Devicesâ„¢, Coffins, Crypts, Mummies, DNA Genetic Reliquaries, Seedbanks, Cloud Storage [Longview]
• International Localism
• Kill Your Idols!
• Practice Not Failure