discover America

A disk drive arrived in the post today with a bunch of data on it. It's plugged into the front of my computer now, with the cardboard box and bubblewrap laid over the workbench. I'm checking that it survived the trip, that the light still lits and the spindle still spins.

It's a terrible sensation when someone's data has been lost, or corrupted, or is otherwise immediately unavailable. Because the circumstances are always extraordinary. A disk has overheated, for instance, and the coil that drives the heads back and forth across the platters has burned out. Or Windows simply crashed and went into a restart in the middle of the night on a weekend and never came out of it again. Or there is some database system someone's been faithfully plugging quotes and orders and information into for the last seventeen years, and the system they bought in 1990 was based on technology last revised in 1982, meaning that no-one possesses a manual and anything that you can begin to understand in it is based upon what you can figure out from eight hundred filenames labelled things like "SFDXQNBT.P".

It's an extraordinary situation. We're not often asked to confront it today: we exist in a leisurely place where the compulsive archival and cataloguing of our recent past is just something that happens in the same way that bricks just don't float airily above the ground. Today it's about what we've done, achieved, experienced, consumed, purchased, investigated, 'favorited', twittered, scrobbled and blogged.

There's something to be said for loss. I'm not sure what. I've always wondered about Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty burning their royalties on Jura. Whether they wouldn't rather have been burning the master tapes to their deleted back catalogue. It wouldn't have taken as long. Perhaps I should found the Warburton Society, dedicated to promoting the transience, incident and irrecoverable loss of history and culture. Maybe. I'll think about it. It should have a website full of blue-bordered broken image links and HTML 2.0. o< "OPTIMISED FOR NCSA MOSAIC!!£LTTTTT£">>>>>


Whenever I have someone attempting to hold me responsible (hint: it's never my fault but I always blame myself) for the loss of their data, it's always a confrontational situation. It can be paralysing. And then I look down and realise that I could walk out of here any time I want to. The passageway is right over there and at the end of the passageway there is a door and then there is a 'foyer' apparently and then the top of the staircase where there is a closet door that I have a key for that will even take you up to the roof. Alternatively you can go down the stairs to the car park. Leave. Go. It's over.

Tomorrow I am flying to America. I will be there for two weeks. I may post photographs.