http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1389491
*Phil Torrone and Limor Fried are mavens of distributed manufacturing. They have a flourishing electronic parts business – design, manufacturing and shipping – that they run out of a home office near Wall Street. Everybody knows that, because Limor and Phil are kinda famous for it. They are classic Web 2.0 "global microbrand" types.
*Now I ask you: is there any sane reason why you should have to watch them stuff an electronic item into a shipping container, print out a label and stick it on there?
*Well, no, you don't have to watch that video I just linked up there – but the interesting part of this stunningly dull video is that, behind the beeping and gleaming facade of MAKE magazine and ADAFRUIT INDUSTRIES, this is what Phil and Limor actually do, most of the time. This is the grainy cinema-verite reality of their daily lives. That's right: when they're off the conference circuit and not being geek-stars, they earn their living stuffing little objects into antistatic bags. Unglamorous, yet authentic.
*Now, thanks to this Ustream scheme, you can see this grain of their existence. It's so cheap that seeing them doing this is almost cheaper than not seeing them doing it. It's like a live video Twitter tweet. A brief but terrible insight into somebody's real-life doings. As opposed to the way you imagined them behaving, when you weren't a live fly on their wall.
*Okay: why would I ever care if Phil Torrone had a burrito for lunch?
*I wouldn't think that I would ever care what Phil Torrone has for his lunch, although Phil, being Phil, has laser-printed burritos for his lunch. Here, look at this.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pmtorrone/sets/72157594324378316/
*Okay, that was worth looking at, right? A laser-printed burrito. You clicked. You kinda had to. That burrito of Phil's is actually kind of hip and witty, right? Now let me ask you: what the hell *is* that? As a modern social gesture, I mean. We both clicked on it, but is it a "joke"? Is it "entertainment"? Would you ever, like micropay somebody to see a laser-printed burrito?
*What the heck kind of social gesture is that? Do you suppose that Phil Torrone would ever laser-print a burrito if he didn't know we were watching his lunch? Heck no he wouldn't – whatever that is, we are empowering that. He does it because we're here. Watching.
*Phil is pretty big on documenting his lunches.
http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=59211514%40N00&q=food
*And you know, I watch all that. I do. I'm not quite sure how to stop watching. It doesn't bother me much to do it. I'm glad to see the guy fed. I'm sure that, knowing that dozens of people watch his food, Phil's gotten a bit theatrical. He eats web 2.0 food now. His food has a social-software element.
*Whatever next?
*All this would be of mild, salsa-flavored geeky interest, if not for the fact that I now have a Ustream account, just like Phil and Limor. Yep, I have a Ustream account and a video-enabled smartphone. So I can throw video onto the web with less effort than it takes me to type this blog post. Shooting video, in late 2009, has finally become stupider, faster and easier than typing. There is less thought involved and fewer keys to press. Seriously.
*I don't know what I'm going to do with that capacity. I have some vague, tremulous ideas about it, but they probably don't matter much. The weird part is that the capacity exists, that it is there. It's all over the place, cloudlike. Not the capacity to go "make a video," 1980s style, but to make video vernacular, to demolish the mediated barriers-to-entry, and make video more insanely banal than any media theorist has ever yet imagined it being.
*It takes more effort to wash a fork and a plate than it does to spew a Ustream video. Compared to vernacular video, lunch is a major intellectual and creative effort. We're into an epoch where a video is something like a dropped napkin.
*Well, "stay tuned." As they used to say when video was tuned.
