Regardless, I don’t buy the argument that computers are still too complicated to surf the web. It’s all about the price point.

Why do I bring up Apple? Well, the foundation of Apple computers is based upon Anthropomorphism and Metaphor. Computers are NOT fundamentally about robotics, it is not an imitation of LIFE, it is not a faithful servant, not merely a speeding up and a transformation on a metaphorical level, as the Japanese believe — the Japanese being the civilization most recently exposed to technology, and also the most mystified. “Apple computers is turning us all Japanese”, someone once kind of astutely or bitterly remarked — not entirely true, Apple computers and anthropomorphism is not unique to a particular culture, but almost a necessary stage that humanity has to pass through whenever it is confronted with anything new.

If not metaphor, (computers as a metaphor for tool) and not anthropomorphism, then what? We are talking about the archive — the written archive has been around, in certain river civilizations, for the over 5000 years, computers are an extension and a complication of that archive. The most important thing about computers is the way in which it organizes memory and reality — well, for one thing, it digitizes everything, it tends to render previous categories obsolete. People have ‘mixed playlists’, and scientists talk about, for example, the frequency responses of classical musicians and compare them to modern musicians. The computer is a destruction of all archives and institutional separations as we know it, and perhaps even a destruction of time and era itself — in the way, for example, that archives are searchable and networked rather than chronological.

The foleo is not a weaker kind of computer, but rather a distillation of the computer into its essence — the everpresent archive, mnemomic prosthesis. Once again, the computer is NOT ‘life’, it is not a swiss army knife that can sync to a million things and control our — I don’t know, electric blender. We have slaves and secretaries for that (”Hey — go make me dinner”) Computers are not electronic slaves, and — if they are — then that is merely a metaporical shift, and nothing to brag about. More importantly, then, it’s an transformation of something that’s been around for milleniums — the textual archive — and all the metaphorical categories that accompanied it.