In honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, Sydd Souza has run my Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom through a perl script that translated it into pirate speak:

I lived long enough t’ be seein’ th’ cure fer Davy Jones’ locker; t’ be seein’ th’ rise o’ th’ Bitchun Society, t’ learn ten languages; t’ compose three symphonies; t’ reckon me boyhood dream o’ takin’ up residence in Disney World; t’ be seein’ th’ Davy Jones’ locker o’ th’ workplace an’ o’ work.

I nerethought I’d live t’ be seein’ th’ tide when Keep A-Movin’ Dan would decide t’ deadhead until th’ heat Davy Jones’ locker o’ th’ Universe.

A conceit in my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is that our cellphones will disappear into our bodies, silently feeding us audio via cochlear implants and micing our throats to pick up sub-vocalizations (something I think I ripped off from Harry Harrison, though others have done it too). Now a DARPA program has produced a functional prototype of a subvocal pickup that can turn words you haven’t spoken into signals on the wire.

One system, being developed for DARPA by Rick Brown of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, relies on a sensor worn around the neck called a tuned electromagnetic resonator collar (TERC). Using sensing techniques developed for magnetic resonance imaging, the collar detects changes in capacitance caused by movement of the vocal cords, and is designed to allow speech to be heard above loud background noise.

DARPA is also pursuing an approach first developed at NASA’s Ames lab, which involves placing electrodes called electromyographic sensors on the neck, to detect changes in impedance during speech. A neural network processes the data and identifies the pattern of words. The sensor can even detect subvocal or silent speech. The speech pattern is sent to a computerised voice generator that recreates the speaker’s words.

(Thanks, John!)

The fall edition of Currents in Electronic Literacy contains a tremendous scholarly essay on Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Eric Mason, called “Remediating the Magic Kingdom: Notes Toward a Poetics of Technology.”

This description of the process of flash-baking reveals the textuality of technology because the experience of the Presidents’ lives that the technology delivers is achieved specifically through texts such as “newspaper headlines, speeches, distilled biographies, personal papers.” The technologicity of texts that this description constructs is one that downplays the specific technological context of these textual genres (i.e. attempts to obscure their specific technologicities). The techno-logic of “gestalts” presented above suggests as well that the experience of a technology is irrelevant to its content–that you can place content from newspapers and biographies into the technology of flash-baking without any loss or change. Such a technologicity of texts works to undermine the specificity of a text’s technological context and the lived experience of technology. Conversely, a responsible poetics of technology refuses to ignore and refuses to obscure the irreducible differences of technologies, arguing that a text and the technology used to create and consume it are consubstantial elements that can be articulated but never transcended.