indefensible:

Often when we yearn for the things of the past it is dismissed as an affectation. As nostalgia. And sometimes, that’s what it is.

But more often, our pangs of desire are not for our youth, or for a false age when everything was better. Instead they are the expression of our immutable desire for imperfection. For there is no adventure in perfection. There is no serendipity in the identical copy.

You see when there are no surprises, that’s when we die.

Ross is really on to something here that I suspect a great many of us who work in digital feel. It’s why kids who grew up with cd’s and a pipe to every pop song ever recorded now crowd the record bins and why letterpress or a laser-etched paper card beats a Photoshop emboss. When I peer through hipstamatic, in a way it’s attempting nostalgia for a thing I’ve never really known but it’s also humanizing a moment that would otherwise be mundane. Adding that layer of imperfection is what turns it from mere surveillance into dare I say art.

I think it’s ok to admit this even though I’m pecking it out on a piece of internet connected glass. There’s no contradiction there for me or even, really, cognitive dissonance – that both things can exist in the same space seems perfectly logical. And, absurdly, human.