Grave Error

Hay tantas cosas por ahí que necesitan respirar, y yo aquí ahogándome.

About one year ago, my brother gave the DVD of the first season of The Wire, an HBO television drama series about police and crime in Baltimore, Maryland. Since then, I have purchased Seasons 2 and 3, and this weekend, I just finished watching Season 3. The Wire is simply fantastic. It develops the stories of not only the police officers, but also of the people that live in Baltimore, and the community in which they live. All of the characters are multi-dimentional and both the police and the citizens (be them criminals, politicians, or ordinary citizens) are portrayed with all of their values and weaknesses.

Furthermore, The Wire accurately tells the story of the tradegy of American cities. All of the characters are living their lives the best way they can, and yet, its seems that no matter how hard they try, there really is no solution to the vicious cycle of the self-destructing world that surrounds their lives. Even when the police finally succeed in closing a case, the overall problem underlying the American city have yet to be solved, and the cycle begins again. Continue reading →

My boss, Martin Varsavsky, wrote a post today on how his computer just crashed. He went on to explain how the loss of his computer wasn’t such a crisis because all of his important “things” were stored externally from his PC in web-based services and applications. These “things” included his photos, emails, word documents, videos, music, etc. Prior to these online storage services, the loss would have been great. With technology, our tangibles have all been converted digitally into intangibles, accessible on demand.

This got me to thinking about “things” and the nature of “things”. In its most basic legal sense, a “thing” is either Real Property or Personal Property. Real Property is what we normally consider to be “real estate” or property that is immovable. On the other hand, personal property (also known as “chattel”) is everything else that is movable. So, my house and the land that it rests upon are real property, and my photographs, music collection, and books are all personal property. Thus, when Martin talks about there being no love lost over the death of his PC, he means that his personal property had been safeguarded from the wreckage.

This seems to say a lot about how the digital age has revolutionized the way we possess things. We no longer need to physically “possess” personal property in order to have ownership over it. What we have is not “possession” over an object but free access to it at any time, anywhere. We can carry what we own, without having to actually carry it on our person. Absent clothing, it seems that we no longer need to check in heavy luggage at airports any more, for everything that is important to us fits somewhere in cyberspace.

Beyond this revolution in storage space, there is an ontological question about possession that mimics this technological phenomenon: what do we have, what do we not have, and how do we have it? Continue reading →

When I was a kid, I used to love the song “Dreamland” by Bunny Wailer from his album Blackheart Man. On days like today, I can hear his voice calling out from a far, “There’s a place that I have heard about, so far across the sea …” And in my mind, I can see that distant land in the shape of my bed as if it were an island continent, beckoning me to be coddled beneath her blankets. My bed is my Dreamland, and it is a heart-wrenching struggle to depart with her each morning.

But it doesn’t always need to be so difficult either.