Purchasing a couple of used horror DVDs at Blockbuster tonight, I mused about the depreciation of DVDs. The pre-viewed circular red sticker advertising $3.99 was covering a previous sticker, one which clamored the low price of $7.99; this in turn occluded a $9.99 sticker; and this in turn was adhered to a $13.99 sticker. Four circular price labels stacked, nay glued, right on top of each other. The depreciation of the medium, as technology inexorably marches forward.
Within a few years the DVD will be mostly obsolete, supplanted by its high-def progeny. That will be replaced by far greater storage-capacity offspring a few years hence, and by the looks of it that will probably not stick around for long before being replaced by hologram-related devices.
Each of these advances is one of those red circular sticker; the future is a stack of concentric changes overlayed to--perhaps superposed with--what came before. And if Singularists are right about things, one sticker will suddenly be square, or trapezoidal.
And then the real fun will begin.
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