I came across this blogpost/essay on Reddit (sorry). The essay is ostensibly about the Casio F-91W, but also about the oppressiveness of the internet of things and how technology often demands so much of our attention. I thought the Lemmy community might appreciate the sentiment.
I love this watch. It’s literally just the clock off of a microwave but strapped to your arm
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He’s not wrong.
I’ve never seen the appeal of a smart watch. My phone already drives me nuts and I can’t see a smart watch helping.
I have A158W which is the same watch but in “shiny and chrome”. I just love this shit.
I’ll pull from Wikipedia’s article on Google’s reCAPTCHA: “…reCAPTCHA provides little security against bots and is primarily a tool to track user data, and has cost society an estimated 819 million hours of unpaid human labor.” The point I want to emphasize is “unpaid human labor”. The article reads as middle-class whinge that pines for when products were whole and finalized. It’s not honest. It hides behind cutesy metaphors, because it’s not cognizant of the real underlying relationships that would turn it into a critique of capitalism. That software copyright became a vehicle for capitalists to hijack property ownership so that the consumer could never own their computers. They’re your computers, but they run their software: you do as the computer tells you to do. Capitalists want more unpaid labor and capital. Pay up piggy. Stop squealing.
Hmm. LLM (coauthored? prompted?) post about being a slave to technology.
Perhaps the author had a quota to meet that week?
Sorta cuts against the premise tho.
PS: not even your Casio is sacrosanct :)
Gross.
I enjoyed that read, sad as it was. True though.
Kinda ironic, because this watch was quite the oposite of a quiet thing. The multiple asynchron beeping every hour through the whole class was … iconic :|
Watches were and are so stupid. Why not just strap my phone to my forearm?
In my opinion, wearing a watch is a way to accessorize and add a little bit of individual style. It’s also nice to just not have to look at your phone for something. This is especially true since there is often so many other things happening on a smart phone competing for attention.
Consider environments where the need to monitor time is invariable, yet smartphones are prohibited on grounds of security, safety or for some other reason. It’s an industry norm to prohibit smartphones in warehouses, a common place of employment throughout industrialized-nations. I’m sure you could think of others if pressed.
From your comment I think you’re referring to wrist-watches. My understanding of the wrist-watches’ popularity is that it was a remnant of the war economy. The military needed personnel to keep track of time; pilots in particular needed wrist-watches for navigation. After the war those factories that mass produced for national militaries still existed and found a bludgeoning middle-class market to sell their gluts: the fashion wrist-watch. The population were conditioned to wear them during war and that behaviour carried on after. I think a similar thing happened with belts too.
It’s rather amusing to consider that pocket-watches have now made a comeback, only they’ve changed form and now offer other functions. Nearly everyone has a pocket-watch; it’s rectangular rather than circular in shape now. Certainly bigger than they used to be. ;)
I used to have one. It hurt my wrist. I don’t need to know what the time is at all in that sort of physical attachment. The clock is on the wall, my phone and my desktop. I don’t need to have a rando company gather data about my physical activities all day long so I can get a pretty graph while they sell information about my health to insurance companies so they can raise my premium based of my couch potatoes. Like seriously nah. I also don’t need to call a guy or AI from my wrist like Michael Knight.
You are thinking about smart watches and not watches, watches just tell you the time and have an alarm.
