Weapons of War

The
Dowbrigade is considered an early adopter, at least among the crowd that
shops at K-Mart and nations belonging to the
Andean Pact. On Friday, still flush with the reflected glory of the Beantown
Boys in the World Series and a check from China for some editing work,
we finally bought an iPod, ending three years of unrequited techo-lust.

What took us so long? Well, a teacher’s salary, for
one.  But let’s not dwell on the past.  We’ve joined the iPod
generation! The only thing that bothered us was that in all of the Apple
iPod ads we have seen, as well as most of the young, hip users on the
street, feature the device held loosely in one hand while the head nods
and the body gyrates wildly. Why hold the damn thing in your hand?  Besides
setting yourself up for a snatch and grab, it seems to us immodest techno-exhibitionism.
A brief glimpse of those distinctive white earbuds peeking out of a collar
or sleeve would be so much sexier and classier. Besides, years of operating
in crowds composed of strange and often untrustworthy people has taught us to keep our hands
empty and available for action at all times.

Be that as it may, as far as we can tell from reading
all of the attendant documentation, there is no REQUIREMENT that you
carry it in your hand.  And we love having all of our extensive
and obscure music collection in the palm of our hand, or wherever. Once
we figured out how to connect it to our computer without erasing all
of the music already loaded (this took a while), we were off to the races.

Now that we’ve gotten to know our new toy, we’ve got
to get our good friends Dave Winer and Adam Curry to teach us how to
turn our iPod into a weapon of war.

No, we are not thinking of packing the shell with some
of that HMX explosives gone missing in Iraq, or filing the brushed Titanium
back case to a razor’s edge.  We are talking about a weapon of cultural
war, of media war, of paradigm war. The only real revolutions are in
the minds and hearts of those who believe in them.  We are assembling
the arms of OUR revolution, and the iPod is one of them.