Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson by Gibson William

Author:Gibson, William [Gibson, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, Philosophy, Writing, Anthologies
Amazon: B01K3NZSG4
Goodreads: 135099277
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2012-01-03T08:00:00+00:00

WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN, traversing the Seventies in whatever post-hippie, preslacker mode I could manage, I made a substantial part of my living, such as it was, in a myriad of minuscule supply-and-demand gaps that have now largely closed. I was what antique dealers call a "picker," a semi-savvy haunter of Salvation Army thrift shops, from which I would extract objects of obscure desire that I knew were upmarketable to specialist dealers, who sold in turn to collectors. To this day I am often unable to resist a professionally quick, carefully dispassionate scan over the contents of any thrift shop, though I almost never buy anything there. Mainly because the cut-rate treasures, the "scores" of legend, are long gone. The market has been rationalized. We have become a nation, a world, of pickers.

There are several reasons for this. One has to do with boomer demographics and the cult of nostalgia. There are now more fiftysomethings than there are primo childhood artifacts of a similar vintage. Most of our toys, unlike the wood and pot-metal of yore, were extrusion-molded ephemera, fragile styrene simulacra, highly unlikely to survive the random insults of time. A great deal of the boomer's remembered world has been melted down, or crushed into unreadable fragments in forgotten strata of landfill. What remains, particularly if it's "mint in box," becomes increasingly rarefied.

Another reason, and this one is more mysterious, has to do with an ongoing democratization of connoisseurship, in which curatorial privilege is available at every level of society. Whether one collects Warhol prints or Beanie Babies becomes, well, a matter of taste.

The idea of the Collectible is everywhere today, and sometimes strikes me as some desperate instinctive reconfiguring of the postindustrial flow, some basic mammalian response to the bewildering flood of sheer stuff we produce.

But the main driving force in the tidying of the world's attic, the drying up of random, "innocent" sources of rarities, is information technology. We are mapping literally everything, from the human genome to Jaeger two-register chronographs, and our search engines grind increasingly fine.

"Surely you haven't been bitten by the eBay bug," said my publishing friend Patrick. We were in the lobby of a particularly bland hotel somewhere within the confines of a New England technology park, and I was in fact feeling twinges of withdrawal.

eBay, which bills itself as Your Personal Trading CommunityTM, is a site that hosts well over 800,000 online auctions per day, in 1,086 categories. eBay gets around 140 million hits per week, and, for the previous few months, a certain number of those hits had been from me.

And, in the process of adding to eBay's gargantuan hit-pile, several days before, I had gotten myself in trouble. In Uruguay.

How this happened: I'm home in Vancouver, midway through that first cup of morning coffee, in front of the computer, ready to work straight from the dreamstate.

I am deep into eBay, half awake, staring at a scan of this huge-ass Zenith diver's watch. And I am, mind you, a practicing ectomorph.

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