Ten years later, you could pick up a digital watch for a quid at the market, and I was working on ideas for what would become my first graphic novel, including a future where the Internet was nothing but a series of walled gardens. Ten years after that, the walled gardens of CompuServe and AOL and all the others were falling down, as the web gained pace, and we were just starting to get into the habit of looking at our mobile phones to check the time. Go forward another ten years, and you start to see the news stories about watch manufacturers starting to suffer the same woes as camera makers, yet another business disrupted by digital device uptake. And here we are today. Visit any technology news service and scroll down briefly. You’ll hit a story about “the war for our wrists.” The digital watch is back, as the “wearable,” the wrist-based Internet terminal, frothed over by writers so buried in that world and its jargon that I’ve seen tech journalists refer to net-connected clothing as “wearable shirts.” Breathless commentaries on the as-yet-unmarketed Apple Watch and its crown-button that makes things happen, with a battery life that will reportedly last within seconds per month. I, personally, want to put a gold chain on my phone, pop it into a waistcoat pocket, and refer to it as my “digital fob watch” whenever I check the time on it. Just to make the point in as snotty and high-handed a way as possible: This is the decadent end of the current innovation cycle, the part where people stop having new ideas and start adding filigree and extra orifices to the stuff we’ve got and call it the future.

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