ghost-modernism

adamconover:

Inspired by my friend Mr. N, I asked for a Casio F-91W for my birthday this year. The watch was introduced in 1991, costs eleven dollars, and hasn’t changed in twenty years. It has an alarm, can beep on the hour, and has a stopwatch that maxes out at 59 minutes 59 seconds. That’s it — those are the three things it can do.

There’s something very attractive to me to wearing a piece of technology so defiantly obsolete. At this point, clocks are everywhere — they’re integrated into every device we use. They’re an afterthought to those devices — “Well, as long as this microwave / music player / telephone / television / camera / shower radio has a display, it might as well have a clock too.” To wear a Casio F-91W is to take a five-cent component of every other piece of electronics on the market, wrap a plastic case around it, and strap it to your wrist as though you were terrified of ever being without it. I love that statement, because it’s wholly retrograde — the sole purpose the watch serves is to allow me to carve out a little piece of my life that isn’t rushing forward to a super-capable future. I love being able to say: “Yes, I have a brand new MacBook Pro, and a smartphone, and I sync all my personal information with the cloud. But my watch — my watch sucks.”

(An interesting side-note: Prosecutors in military tribunals at Guantanamo have used possession of an F-91W as evidence of terrorist activities by detainees. Crazy.)

I find this charming. It reminds me of the monologue about cassette tapes in one of Dan Erenberg’s plays.