Motorola StarTAC selon Bruce Sterling (2002)

[Obs.: O Motorola StarTAC foi lançado em 1996, vendeu cerca de 60 milhões de unidades e foi eleito o “6th Greatest Gadget of the Past 50 Years” pela revista PC World em 2005. A descrição de Sterling citada abaixo, publicada em 2002, interessa pela maneira como antecipa aspectos da nossa relação contemporânea com smartphones.]

Now let’s consider the contemporary Motorola StarTAC cellular phone. I happen to have one right here in my jeans pocket, since it is a blobject and it commonly clings to my rump. I’ll hold it in my hand and we can all have a good, close look at it. In fact, if I had your number, I could talk to you right now. Instead of my words boiling off from ink and paper with a lag time of months or years […], you’d have a lag of mere milliseconds; you’d have me clamped to the side of your head; you’d hear me breathing into this thing. […] End users are postindustrial people. They survive by creating new opportunities and by networking feverishly inside unstable, rapidly changing industries that are in permanent disequilibrium. […] Instead of bending metal every day in the machine shop, you spend your time negotiating on relationship machines, such as this cell phone. Coordinating. Compromising. Building coalitions. Answering your phone mail and reading your e-mail. Getting and staying up to speed. […] But toys, tools, and devices aren’t built just for the sake of their buyers. We must also bear in mind the pressing needs of the manufacturer, whose interests often directly conflict with the customer. […] Therefore, the cell-phone company sells me a StarTAC […] in order to entice me into a committed, networked digital relationship. The sexy hardware is merely a come-on; the relationship is what matters. […] The cell-phone company certainly doesn’t want me pursuing any simpler, purer, easier way of life. Not only will I go broke if I do this; so will they. So they want me fully engaged in the process; they want to keep my eyeballs faithfully stuck to the screen and my fingertips caressing those little phone buttons for as long as possible. After all, they are selling me hours of use—not efficiency. People with simple, efficient, solitary lives don’t much need cell phones. […] So the service provider wants end users to network and to keep paying money and attention. End users want an innovative environment in which they can move up and compete, without being sidelined and bankrupted by obsolescence. The powerful vector between these forces, these fierce demands from the end user and the manufacturer, has given birth to this new kind of device. It is a ductile, very capable, extremely demanding, disposable relationship machine. […] That is why this Motorola StarTAC looks and behaves the way it does. Now I can put it back in my pocket, where it can once again disappear and be taken utterly for granted. (Sterling 2002:83-7)

STERLING, Bruce. 2002. Tomorrow now: envisioning the next fifty years. New York: Random House.

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50 anos do PPGS/IFCH/Unicamp! Surfar sem morrer na praia (Foucault, Kittler e Mandelbrot, via Deleuze 2013 [1986], Winthrop-Young 2000 e Plant 1997)) Crise no ciberespaço-tempo neoliberal (Fisher 2013) Simondon centenário Marx associacionista (Bryant 2010)