Life among the robots:

This is not intended to be a cynical critique of the average drone's life of drudgery, my title is instead meant to suggest literal robots, though loosely defined.

Jes has been working a six-day ten-to-five workweek since I have been on summer break and I have been home alone with Elliot, the pets, and the bots - that is to say our washers of dish and tumblers of laundry, our computers and cameras, CD-DVD and Wii, stations of play, lap and desk tops, ice making side-by-side refrigeration and self-cleaning stove, scanners and palm pilots, central air and many gallon water heater (inscrutably guessing at where I will need hot water and when), door sensors, CO2 sensors, heat sensors, temperature gages, proximate automobiles, British voiced alarm avatar, widgets and gadgets galore. I am whelmed by these overages of techne.

I often use the plate spinner metaphor in my writing, but it seems ever so apt and analogically expandable as I multi-task from work station to workstation, winding up each little clockwork according to its means. Where are the people, the interlocutors for these interlocking systems? They are at work earning the ideas that these spinning plates save labor rather than create it. I could go out and see people, but then I would need to buy something to predicate and purpose the interaction. Instead, Elliot and I will once again descend into the basement to mutter Marxist musings on the mystifying modern man; besides, it's too hot out for much else.