With Resolution 917, Atticus Dowd delivered a message to the business world that foreshadowed his bid for political prominence; Simplicity equals power. 

        In a world where multitasking is the norm and attention spans are simultaneously broad and shallow, Dowd’s bill was an olive branch to conservatives and anyone over the age that one would consider to be a “millennial” (if you don’t know, get the video.) 

        Although ridiculously unpopular with the public at the time, the resolution brought record profits after it was announced. When the government stepped in and declared that all products from a company are only compatable with other items offered by that manufacturer and that each product had to be separate entities capable of a single function only, we the people thought it was only a matter of time before it was overturned. As  a reader of this forum, you already know how wrong we were as this law is ancient history 

        It was a coup on our wallets, to paraphrase some of today’s resistance leaders. All the big kids: Apple, Samsung, Google, even Dowd’s own insisted it was wrong and against their wishes. Who would want to pay for something individually that we were getting in a package deal? Weren’t we getting enough bang for our buck with our Iphones and Androids? Shouldn’t they get a chance to duke it out in an all out cold war between competing sentient synthetic devices? Or at least let them team up against Amazon’s Alexa (a flash in the pan AI that lasted as long as our ancestors eight track fad). 

      The answer of course was “we want the new stuff, pedal it faster please.” It did not matter that we had to spend more on separate objects because we were just looking to burn our money up somehow anyway. We wanted to have a phone that was a phone, and a computer that was a computer, a pedometer that was... I digress. 

     The separation of these items helped us feel like we had more because, of course, we physically did. Compartmentalization was dying, it was time to expand and accumulate. This was a new era for planned obsolescence and it dawned on America like a black hole sun. 

     Equal parts insidious and ingenious, the modern media market was transformed by the bill now known as the Dowd Act. The days of the “smart” phone were over. The post thought culture had begun. 

Excerpted from Modern Day # 345

        Phone Home: The prodigal return of the communication tool from the extravagance of Devicedom to being an object that people use to talk to one another.

By 

Sadie M. Vondeerjei