Ramble On: Internet and all that filing stuff.

Just talking about stuff. Response friends’ post on Facebook, slightly edited. 

DURING typewriter days, I used to maintain my own filing system at home. Cut-out newspaper/magazine articles, neatly-catalogued photographs, some in binders. In these internet days, we “file” stuff in hard drives, thumb drives, and iCloud. Yet if you ask me what is more secured? Uh huh? I have 7 laptops, majical cellphone, dozens of thumb-drives, google docs, blogs, Yahoo and Gmail inboxes. Safe? Nope. 

       The scarier part of new tech or how we are forced to use electronic devices is the loss of our identity, privacy, personal us. Little example: I now write or file stuff on Google Docs. I draft all my posts. Yet even before I post them on Facebook, I already get ads that pertain to my draft/posts. They know what I am writing before they go "public" because of the "connectedness" or connectivity of whatever we write or store or file in a plugged-up computer gadget. Then, manuscripts on paper stayed where we wanted them, songs were stored where can access them before sharing etcetera. 

       These days? When AI finally takes us out of the "work," where are we by then? Simply consumers and buyers of whatever can be had--via the internet. 🗄📰🗄

NOTHING in this world will ever be "kept" because that is The World. That is Life. Yet it doesn't mean we will just give away what we own, especially our individual minds that we "save" in our respective work or products. That is why there is a law. Of course, the law can be inutile as well as proof of Adolf Hitler stealing many work of art and burning the rest. So those that remained, governments keep them as national treasures. 

       Law also in most cases benefits the corporate god over the lowly craftsperson. But I want to exist fighting them. Exist working around evil and good. Meanwhile, we can try to protect our work as another cataclysm or world war comes. Life. All those "proof" things that computer technology offers to "keep" or protect the work? Nope. It'd be easier to steal, burn and destroy them. No need for floods or nukes. Just 1 click, done. And those that they want to keep for themselves, they have them. Not ours anymore. We will just be tiny bits in a composite electronic perfection called AI. 

       In fact, they already did. We cannot get back or retrieve what are ours anymore. They'd say we surrendered them, willingly. You see, I don't have any problem with life's imperfection. That makes living thrilling and exciting. Floods, fires, nukes or zombie apocalypse can erase stuff. Including me. True. But I want to exist that way. Imperfect. That is the life that I knew and can afford. Not an automated existence where control is the accepted truth because they already owned us. An electronic life that breathes per preprogrammed reflex. We will be part of the machine. It just isn't me. 🦾💻🦿

Famous Photography.

Previously posted on my Facebook Page. 

Zigzag Road, officially Kennon Road, is a two lane 20.83 mile roadway in Benguet province in the Philippines connecting the mountain city of Baguio to the lowland town of Rosario in La Union province. Baguio is my family’s 2nd home city (after Quezon City). I used to travel up/down the road. The road project started in 1903 during American commonwealth time; named after its builder Col. Lyman Walter Vere Kennon of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 📷📸📸

“The Kissing Sailor.” A sailor, George Mendonsa (1923–2019), jubilantly kissing a woman, Greta Zimmer Friedman (1924-2016), in Times Square on August 14, 1945. The kiss came after news of Japan's surrender, ending World War II. "Suddenly I was grabbed by a sailor, and it wasn't that much of a kiss," Ms Friedman told the Library of Congress. Life photographer Alfred Eisenstadt and Navy photographer Victor Jorgensen both captured the moment. 📷📸📸

“Migrant Mother.” Dorothea Lange’s 1936 photograph of 32-year-old farmworker Florence Owens Thompson and three of her children, huddled in a tent at a pea-pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California. The image epitomizes the desperate circumstances during the Great Depression. The photo was made for the U.S. Resettlement Administration, a federal agency created to document and remedy the plight of the urban and rural poor in the 1930s. 📷📸📸

Marilyn Monroe’s “flying skirt.” Photographed by Sam Shaw. The dress was designed by William Travilla for a sequence in the 1955 film “The Seven Year Itch,” directed by Billy Wilder. The scene: Monroe and costar Tom Ewell exit the Trans-Lux 52nd Street Theatre on Lexington Av. When they hear a subway train passing below the sidewalk grate, she steps on it and asks "Ooh, do you feel the breeze from the subway?" as the wind blows the dress up, exposing her legs. 📷📸📸

“Lunch atop a Skyscraper” was taken on Sept 20, 1932, of 11 ironworkers sitting on a steel beam 850 feet above the ground on the 69th floor of the RCA Building (Rockefeller Center) in Manhattan NYC. Arranged as a publicity stunt, it was part of a campaign promoting the skyscraper. The photo was often misattributed to Lewis Hine, a Works Progress Administration photographer. In 2016, the photography was acquired by the Visual China Group. 📷📸📸