This is my slowly disintegrating computer. It’s bursting apart into gadgets and modules, each one good for what it does, but none a full experience. Sometimes when I go out, I carry the screen and the speakers but not the keyboard. Other times, I don’t bother with the speakers but want the keyboard and the screen.

The far side of this seems so obvious that it feels inevitable: Computers made of ad hoc clusters of devices that are as interchangeable and compatible as an ad hoc cluster of pens, pencils, scrap paper, and notebooks. I see stacks of thinscreens as cheap and shareable as office supplies. Bits of computers as semi-communal possessions, the way that re-useable shopping bags or tupperware containers are.