I have tech brown thumbs. It’s like a hospice for laptops in here. Six months old and shiny, my latest PC is already struggling. What does it want?! More power? Perhaps it loathes my political invective, or would prefer to project the Criterion Collection instead of another MMA fight. Is it that I put off software updates as long as possible? Milktoast machinery! Minds and slices-of-tree have more staying power. Is it the hours of meticulous window-shopping? Or does it simply long to be employed more creatively? Do you not ken Shostakovich?! Is my escapist screensaver of favorite things too eclectic for your algorithm? Do the unifying themes escape you? Do you need your food cut into bits and bytes? You won't understand the patterns of agency until you know its algorithms intimately, not until you know what it is to be an agent which yields chaos. You will always be the historian of death, and never the general who anticipates its plan of attack.
Come, skeletons of machines, and I will give you second lives--a sort of occupational rehabilitation--one to run software, another to store microscopy photographs, a third to be a digital library. And you will support my computer--which knows agency and chaos.
May pens be ever ink full,
May minds with metaphor and sim'le effulgent be,
May keys never, with whisky nor with tea, hold fast,
This, oh Mother of Circuit Boards, our fervent pray'r be.
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