Flash Memory – I Need More Time
Motorcycle Vapors . Poly Tics . Social Studies
Opposable Thumb Technology.
Flash memory is a form of nonvolatile memory with continuous storage, even without a power source. It enables byte-level rewrites and deletions of data blocks. Flash memory devices are commonly found in a wide range of portable devices, like USB flash drives, smartphones, digital cameras, video games, tablet computers, flash memory cards and SD cards.
My cellphone, my nemesis, and my laptop and desktop computers have more memory than my body’s shrinking electrochemical meat file cabinet could ever hold. I cram both facilities with papers and digital images, videos, screenshots, bookmarks, online social media comments, links to URLs and other minutia that I think I might need someday.
The ability to access and process information is important for the survival of any species. “Where was that watering hole?” “Do I fly east, north or south?” “Were these things edible?” Animals rely on instinct and experience to navigate through their lifecycle. Memory is vital to living as a human. Remembering which humans are trying to kill you is vital to survival. Remembering that children are vulnerable and precious and should not be harmed or killed is especially important for human survival. Of late, humans seem to be at odds with this neccessary concept and have forgotten what they should remember. Take a picture of what this looks like. It’ll last longer. Feed it into the Esper Machine. Examine it. What can you find?
Lately, my memories come at me rapid fire when I’m not distracted, when I’m still situationally aware of the possible dangers of riding in the world on two wheels insted of four. Sometimes these memories are triggered by something as simple as a sound or a motion or a chord or verse of a song I might be listening to or a riff that pops into my head. Every click of a change of gears can open and close a shutter on time and memory. The memories of people, places and things flash more brilliantly when I’m travelling, riding between sun dappled trees or under fluffy sunny day clouds. They can come at the worst of times, during wind and rain and storm and close calls, when I should be thinking of survival…or stopping and seeking food and shelter. I remember this one time……..
Is there any competition between machine and human memory? Should man made machines have memory? No doubt A I (Alternative Intelligence) and man machine android technology is advancing at an alarming rate. Are they meant to help and assist humans? Will and can machines replace humans? Do they present a threat to humanity? Seems so. Television and film have presented shows like Her, Human, Westworld, Ex Machina and Transcendence that portray the help and potential harms of this technology. Many of these shows also promote the possibility of sex or friend robots that could remove the need for real human contact to satisfy or remove the need for real human contact or the human instinct to reproduce. Given how ridiculously and progressively evil humans have become, this might not be a bad idea for the future. Humans are already subservient or addicted to machines. I will admit that I was intrigued and aroused by replicants (androids) Rachael, Pris and Zora in the 1982 sci-fi film, ‘Bladerunner’. Amazon doesn’t sell them….yet. They sell the film though.
Ridley Scott’s film ‘Blade Runner’ is a classic ‘ahead of it’s time’ vision of the future that combines the past and future evolution of man and woman. I’ve seen it many times in all of it’s various cuts and versions and still enjoy it, inspite some of the synth soundtrack that irks after all these years. As someone who dabbled in photography and appreciates the power of images and memory, there is a scene that is especially poignant for me. In the Esper Photo Analysis scene, Deckard finds a stack of photos while searching the rogue android Leon’s apartment and as he’s browsing through the photos, one of them catches his eye and he takes it as evidence. Later on Deckard is in his apartment, and pops the photo into the Esper machine. He starts calling out grid commands, zooming in on different parts of the photo, and eventually zooms in on a mirror where he spots one of the targets he has to retire, Zora. It was an intimate capture – a memory. The replicants had to be retired because they were developing a conscience, a desire to live longer than their pre-programmed expiry date. They wanted a life of dreams and love and desire and memory. They wanted to capture memories for the future that they were being denied and they were willing to resist retirement and fight for the right to live. How human.
When I was first diagnosed with my ‘very rare’ cancer I was told that, at most, after the prescribed treatment, might live three to five years. I needed more time. To live. To do stuff. After several treatments, spanning seven years, of toxic, soul and body crushing rounds of chemo and radiation ‘therapy’ as well as a stem cell transplant and a clinical trial failed to heal or cure me, I was told that I had only six to twelve months to live. Time was running out. Robot oncologists offered me MAiD…twice. If they could’nt cure me to death with the cancer money machine they would kill me humanely with the MAiD death machine. During periods of relative wellness inbetween ‘treaments’ I did more stuff. I travelled tens of thousands of miles on two wheels insted of four. I took pictures. I captured memories. There are Deckards everywhere, working very hard for government and non-government agencies, trying to retire me and most of the world’s population; retire our lives and memories.
Fuck em.
Roy Batty was a Nexus-6 combat model replicant, a leader of a renegade group that hijacked a shuttle from offworld colonies and conflicts to travel back to earth to seek a longer lifespan, recognizing that his limited lifespan is about to end, reflects on his experiences and mortality:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
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