#182 Snippie

Miniaturization is one of the great breakthroughs of modern times. From brick to razor in less than a generation the cellphone has lightened our physical load. My load is even lighter. I don’t carry one at all. But miniaturization is everywhere. From reel-to-reel to eight track to cassette. From VHS to 8mm to Digital Tape. From room size computers to laptops, everything is smaller, faster, and less comprehensible. But no matter, as long as you can point and click and possess more than a modicum of trust you can get just about anywhere on the internet, including help sites to FAQ you through your latest technological acquisition. And with any luck, one of the helpful websites, or the next CD you buy from Sony, won’t plant a virus in the impacted bowels of your computer.
Still, you can’t change human nature. Everybody wants something for nothing—whether it’s music download pirates or corporate pirates looking to harvest personal data from your computer. Cookies are no different from Napster in my opinion, both of them ignore some pretty basic rights—rights to intellectual property and rights to intellectual privacy.
But data storage devices keep getting smaller. From hard drive to zip drive to memory stick, from Laser Disk to DVD to the snippet of a semiconductorage that is the next wave. I just read where it’s about time for the techno-mavens to release full length movies on a chip the size of your fingernail. That’s right, the entire 6 episodes of Star Wars boxed set all on a chip the size of a thimble. That’s 4 all the way through 3—and the making of. The Chips are ready and the special players are ready. The new technology will put DVDs to shame, not to mention those antique videotapes. So far, there only seems to be one hold-up to the release of the technology. Packaging. Or should I say human nature in the form of craven dishonesty. Cause even though the movie’s gonna be the size of a raisinet, there ain’t no way you’ll be able to buy it in the store unless it’s in a 12-inch by 6-inch shoplifter-proof blister-pack. Isn’t it sad? The smaller and more streamlined the product, the bigger and bulkier the package we have to put it in. So even though we can pack more and more tiny stuff into our homes and cars, the stores that carry all that tiny stuff have to keep getting bigger and bigger and boxier and boxier. Why? Just so they can display the packaging.
America, ya gotta love it.