Recollection Services Incorporated

What Is An OK Computer?

An OK Computer is a circular notion that the contemporary user who is so deeply embedded in it, being that his alienation has not yet ripened to full maturity, is unable to escape. His interaction with the technological is organic, inculcated to normalcy from a young age. During the early 2000’s with the advent of personal computing and its proliferation in working class households, this strange new device entered the scene and all that came with it. Being that it was, at the time, not only a luxury to own, and a mystical experience to work with, but the act of acquiring it required the procession of entire swaths of people, that the head of the household usually initiated. In making a collective decision, to allocate financial resources and alter the essential nature of private space, a separate sphere of utility was assigned that once initiated, would start to creep into the workings of the body.

In those days, infection was a real possibility and the device ran the risk of malfunction, or even total breakdown in the event of a power surge. Contemporary exploitation is far more subtle, seeking to sustain the lifespan of the device in an exfiltration of information. These early viruses – bugs, trojans – embedded in user space so deeply that they often required consulting a specialist. If successful, their diagnosis and removal would breathe new life into the machine. Today, the programs may lie dormant for years and it might take a careful observer to identify such arrays of bot-nets that engage in a passive collection of information. This requires vigilance.

If you’ve ever looked closely at the album cover, OK Computer is an album dealing with a man having reached an age of maturity in a recollection of the technological. Listen closely, you will see a static image of a freeway interchange upon which is superimposed the faint outline of two figures. It’s the trolley problem all over again. It is, according to Thom Yorke, “Someone’s being sold something they don’t really want, and someone’s being friendly because they’re trying to sell something.” Released on May 28, 1997 and recorded for the most part in an English Manor, the album prefigures the popular proliferation of alienation in its relation to modern technology. In the closing track, Yorke disparagingly mulls, “Idiot, slow down, slow down!”

An OK Computer is being 1, getting home at the end of the day, and being engaged in a passive collection of information… on a computer – it’s staring at the TV screen, watching advertisements, at the bar, or bouncing ideas off the wall. Even some people are OK Computers, but an OK Computer is only possible if we all give into dogmatism. An OK Computer is symptomatic of mediocrity in the sphere of the technological – no more glory or ancient monuments – and the OK Computer is largely responsible for a general feeling of malaise that is felt amongst the population. What is necessary is a reconfiguration of the self by means of an analysis of the structural workings in a computer.