How to Spend Your Inheritance
Wally Wood drew Mickey Mouse having an orgy in 1967 and it was art—subversive, hilarious, and genuinely dangerous in the way only things that make large corporations very unhappy can be. The piece ran in Paul Krassner’s countercultural magazine The Realist and became a landmark of underground comix: Disney’s wholesome characters in explicit parody, innocence and corporate mythology devouring each other. Fifty years later, those same images ended up on functional skate decks sold through a Paris art boutique. Whether that’s a fitting continuation of the original act of defiance or a commodification of it is probably a question with two correct answers simultaneously. At around €300 each they’re not cheap—but you’re buying a piece of art history you can also grind a curb with, and that’s a reasonable trade by any measure.
Nike released their FuelBand wristbands around the same time—sleek LED fitness trackers that promised to quantify every movement of your day and sync the results to your iPhone so your friends could witness you taking the stairs. The whole thing felt genuinely futuristic in 2012, like wearing a fragment of a spaceship on your wrist. In retrospect, they were the first crack in the dam that gave us a world where people stare at step counts instead of windows. I’m not sure we came out ahead on that exchange.
I still carry a second-generation iPod mini alongside my iPhone, and I don’t particularly want to be talked out of it. The phone already does too much, knows too much, tracks too much. The iPod is dumb and perfect—it plays music, and that’s all it does. Apple was still selling nanos at this point: 16 gigabytes, €169, every color imaginable including several you didn’t know you wanted. The argument for one isn’t very different from my argument now. Sometimes you don’t want the whole internet in your pocket while you’re just listening.
Samsung announced the Galaxy S III Mini to round things out—a shrunken version of their flagship, 4-inch display, 1GHz dual-core chip, 5-megapixel camera. A phone for people who found the S III too large, which in 2012 meant people with ordinary-sized hands. We didn’t know yet that screens would only grow, that 4 inches would eventually register as a toy. Progress moves in one direction only.