Droid quote of the "week" # 3

"Droid: The buffet for the serious app glutton"

Last week's discussion of the relationship between appetite and muscle bore little fruit. Just some parsley and a tuft of hair in the goblin lobe. But lo-be-hold: from this week's quote a sprig of hope (?!) springs up, hinting at the cornucopia of insight that might lie beyond any bulb of fruit or leafy lobe.

Thus it stands: "Appetite" and "application" yield their common seed in the root "app." "App" itself is a mutation of "ad," or "to." "Ad-petere" roughly means "to seek toward." "Ad-plicare" roughly means "to fold to" or "to attach to." A computer application, then, would be a function that "applies" technology to a new or special purpose.

Inherent in the human/animal is an appetite (desire); inherent in the machine is the application (the tool with which desire is "quenched"*). Last week's "intersection of appetite and muscle" confounded because appetite and muscle both seem to be characteristics of the human/animal--how could a technology stand as an intersection between two organic properties?

This week's quote elucidates, terrifies. The juxtaposition of "app" and "glutton" reveals that Droid is playing on the shared root of "appetite" and "application." Whereas last week's "appetite and muscle" confused by not disclosing the route of intersection, this new connection plants the seed of intersection within the consumer/desiring body.

The fact that appetite and muscle belong to the animal at first led me to believe that Droid was simply portraying itself as animal, an organism with hunger and the muscle to wrangle its prey. This is an old advertising trick especially prominent in car commercials (horsepower, epithets, commercials set in the Serengeti). But the reality is much darker. No longer can the victim parse a one-to-one correspondence between device and analogue, product and symbol. Droid intersects, cuts across the organic and splices itself within it. What we face now is a virus of which "app" is the seed.

The abridged "app,**" as a symbolic unit but also a unit of desire, transfers the viral DNA of the Droid's "application" to the consumers body, manifesting itself as "appetite." Suddenly, we are machinic producers of our own desire. Appetite leads to application, application leads to appetite. Our hunger, our muscle, our intelligence, our affection reduce to applications of our own bodies***. Droid acting like human/animal is something we are equipped to understand; Droid and human subliming into a multiplicity of contingent desires gives me the willies.

One disorienting Droid commercial asks us, "does your phone do searches of the word 'human' on the web?" I say to myself at first: how cute, a machine wants to be human! Or I say to myself: Oh no, the machine is trying to enslave us! How Matrixy! Throw both of those conjectures out the window. I ought to ask myself: Why would a machine search at all unless it is a desiring machine? I should ask myself: are not we the searcher, the desiring machine? Does not this Droid commercial dramatize the growing desire of the human to define himself through search engines, applications, technologies of his own devising? My friends, the cyborg approacheth, and he is a capitalist. I leave you:

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Droid

For Thine is the App

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Droid

Life is very long

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Droid

For Thine is the Internet

Between the appetite

And the muscle

Falls the Droid

For Droid Does

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* Or propagated, a we shall later see

** The "Apple" Corporation suddenly takes on a new cast--not to mention Johnny Appleseed, though that's neither here nor there

*** See anything written by William Borroughs; See Deleuze/Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus"