More Technophilia

Josh writes:

Arse. Ive been sitting on this one since the Spongebob post, but now it's become topical(ish), so I'd better get it out there while there's still time for me to look merely unoriginal instead of behind the times...

My mobile phone is a Nokia 6600, which I bought myself for my birthday last year at a price of NZ$way-way-too-fucking-much. In addition to general telephony, it takes photos, browses the Internet, sends and checks my email, plays movies and MP3s, talks to my computer via Bluetooth, acts a remote control, and runs a port of Doom.

It has been on the market for over 18 months, and is therefore completely outdated. Again, living in the future: good.

Note, however, that this cellphone fetish does not mark me as a geek. Geeks have no time for cellphones, which often strikes one as odd, given that they generally love anything shiny and technological and unergononmically small. Russell Beattie, the cellphone fetishist's cellphone fetishist, doesn't seem to get why geeks take any opportunity to whinge on Slashdot about how modern cellphones are full of features they don't want. I've never met the man, nor had any form of personal interaction with him, but I find his confusion surprising given that, going by his site, he must have daily exposure to the geek mind, and must therefore have a pretty good understanding of how it works.

Cellphones, you see, are different from regular technology in that they are now an artifact of the Filthy Layperson, and therefore of no interest to the discerning geek, as there is no opportunity to be l33t or uber or whatever-the-kids-say-these-days about something when your grandmother owns a better one than you do. For similar reasons, geeks hate it when people say "dub dub dub" when telling someone a website address -- this too is a term of the Filthy Layperson, who encroaches on the Internet, the rightful domain of the geek. But that's a whole different fistfight waiting to happen.