The beginning of Doug Adams’ So Long and Thanks For All the Fish features a character whose name I cannot recall, but I recall very clearly the typically Adamsean riff that describes this character’s realisation that the world in which he lives—which is, of course, our world as it was some time in the mid-Eighties—is insane, and his subsequent construction of an inside-out building known as Outside The Asylum, the idea being that he had actually built a sanatorium within which the rest of humanity could be housed and sheltered, as befits a patient with profoundly delusional patterns of behaviour.

This character’s realisation of the world’s insanity is sparked by his encountering a set of detailed instructions in a packet of toothpicks.

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Via Bruce Sterling, I think I may finally have encountered my own equivalent of the toothpick instruction manual: a soldering iron with an operating system.

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This is what I mean when I say the whole “AI” thing is paradigmatic; this is what I mean when I talk about solutionism; this is the hammer-maker restlessly deciding that every damned fucking thing can be a nail, if they just hit it hard enough.

There is no world in which a soldering iron would ever need to have software.

But we have dirt-cheap processors and little screens and we have software up the wazoo and we have people will seemingly spend money on the craziest shit if you only market it right… and so we have soldering irons with software, we have (allegorical) toothpick instruction manuals, and we have apocalyptic wastelands in the Global South where kids pick through the pointless gimmicky shit we throw away, in hope of salvaging enough increasingly scarce material to keep themselves fed for a day.

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(For those following along with the drama: we’re only 2.5 days into the renovations of my bathroom, and work has already come to a halt due to the discovery of extensive damp beneath the old tiles. As evidenced above, I am dealing with the prospect of an undefined but increasing number of weeks without access to my own toilet or washing facilities with the cheerful equanimity for which I am justly famed.)