Technology
Boldly Into the Future
Pixel Time; Privacy Inside The Panopticon; Phone Zombies; Cut-through Advertising; Dances With Avatar; All The News That's Fit To Tweet.
Technology was a mirage. What you saw was never quite what you got.
Yet to our credit we also did brilliant things with it that decades ago would have been dismissed as mere science fiction.

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We took your privacy seriously: The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner; The Information and Privacy Commission of NSW; The NSW Information Commissioner; The NSW Privacy Commissioner; The Privacy Amendment (Enhancing Privacy Protection) Amendment Act 2012 (Cth); The Australian Privacy Foundation; The Cyberspace Law and Policy Community; The NSW Council for Civil Liberties; The Law Council of Australia Business Law Privacy Sub-committee; The Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) Serious Invasions of Privacy in the Digital Era Inquiry; The Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) to replace the National Privacy Principles and Information Privacy Principles; The drone "roundtable" inquiry by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs; The Royal Guide Dogs of Tasmania Privacy Officer


A Menckenesque kaleidoscope ensured that everyone in Wollongong could see you taking a bath (Feb 2011)
Congestion busting: High speed rail was forever on everyone's agenda


Bushfire wreckage, Zigzag Railway Clarence NSW (Jul 2019)
Together alone: Everything you could ever want, via your smart-phone


Pitt Street Mall passageway (Aug 2018)
Fly the friendly skies: All this technology and yet aeroplanes could be made to disappear by simply turning off a transponder


Church Street cones at Parramatta (Feb 2017)
Accelerated obsolescence: Yesterday's broadcast-quality production equipment was re-purposed as landfill


Tape-based off-line editing equipment in a dumpster at Darling Harbour (Jan 2013)
Green energy: Renewables struggled beneath a mantle of ignorance, conspiracy and fossil fuels (RN, 2014)


Distribution cables (since demolished) in College Lane, at Stanmore in Sydney (Sep 2012)
To deindustrialise: Modern man must satisfy his need for the power process largely through pursuit of the artificial needs created by the advertising and marketing industry, and through surrogate activities
(Kaczynski, 1995)


The abandoned remains of the Illawarra Coke Company at Coalcliff (Sep 2014)
The well-connected domicile: Plasma in the bedroom; LCD in the lounge-room; Playstation, XBox, iPhone, Galaxy, Note, iPad, Touch, iPod, Android and iOS scattered everywhere else


Home entertainment in suburban Kingswood, in Sydney's West (Sep 2010)
The social network: CNN, Bloomberg, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Pinterest, 4/8Chan, Thomson Reuters Eikon: we built elaborate frameworks to ensure you were never alone


Stargazer lawn at Barangaroo Reserve, Sydney (Aug 2016)
Perpetual congestion: Once the great symbol of individual freedom and personal mobility, the car has become a ball and chain. Slow, expensive, and surrounded by endless others, automobiles have taken us as far as they can
(Hume, 2012)


Weedon Avenue garage at Paddington (Mar 2017)
Built for comfort: Cruise control ✓ Loudspeakers ✓ Touch-screen TV ✓ Dual petrol tank caps ✓ Oversize padded seat ✓


Indian Roadmaster motorbike at Mandible Street, Alexandria (Aug 2019)
Aerotropolis now: We took inexpensive aviation for granted and assumed it would never end


Sunrise over the Sydney International Airport (Nov 2017)
The imperfect panopticon: One nation under CCTV, but who was watching?


Apartment courtyard surveillance cameras awaiting connection at Victoria Park (Sep 2014)
Keeping the past alive: Engineering was sidelined because our brightest kept choosing to become CPAs, LLBs, MPsychs, FRACGPs and BA(Hons)MT


Sand-blasting and repainting the Sydney Harbour Bridge to replace the decades-old lead-based paint (Jul 2011)
Phamping: We queued for days to get our hands on the new 128GB Rose Gold iPhone 6S Plus


Tents outside the Sydney Apple Store (Sep 2015)
Think small: The opera house refurbishment didn't quite go according to plan


Domestic fountain at Church Street in Croydon (Sep 2016)
Springtime for Eloi: We were forever amazed by the vast contraptions built by our distant ancestors


Sydney Harbour sunrise kayaks (Jan 2019)
Computer says no: We could detect Gravitational Waves (LIGO, 2015), prove Fermat's last theorem (Wolfram, 2014) and even ridicule Wall Street's misuse of Gaussian copula functions (Wired, 2009) — but no-one could figure out the true cost of mobile-phone plans (WSJ, 2013)


Mobile phone users at Martin Place, Sydney (Dec 2014)
Pan Atomicus: 48 tonnes of reactor fuel blew into the atmosphere; 500 000 liquidators tried to clean the mess; 335 000 evacuees fled; 6 000+ citizens died; 90 000+ animals were killed; 20× factor increase in mutations; 2600 km² exclusion zone; €2.15 billion for the New Safe Confinement; $235 billion in damages; the collapse of the USSR… the effects of 1986-04-25 are with us still (National Geographic, 2019)


Heritage locomotive at Central Station, Sydney (Jun 2019)
Reeks & Wrecks: A sustainable future may only be found in recycling and repairs


Cardboard packaging in Blue Anchor Lane at Circular Quay, awaiting transport to an interstate landfill (Nov 2017)
Off-line storage: We built tank-farms to contain all our dreams


Storage tanks at Tempe (Sep 2012)
Chariots of freedom: We were what we drove


Custom license plates, Sydney (Nov 2018)
The flipped classroom: Students with their own laptop and internet connectivity always had up-to-date information at their fingertips


At the State Library of NSW (Oct 2014)
Moving forward: Jet-packs; Thunderbirds; Monorails; London to Sydney in 90 minutes; Driverless cars on suburban roads


First Lane at Hurstville, Sydney (Sep 2016)
Brand garbage: 2000-08-07 purchase Omega Speedmaster Automatic watch (35105000) #56462628 $2150; 2001-01-13 repair under warranty for loud rattling inside watch; 2005-03-29 repair due to watch stopped $595; 2009-08-03 repair due to watch requiring movement replacement $655; 2017-07-20 watch gains 10 minutes every hour, Omega quote to replace movement and watch hands $1295 (+ $75 courier fee); 2017-07-25 quote declined and watch returned without repair; 2017-08-15 throw watch into landfill at Blaxland Waste Management Facility


A wristwatch achieved its destiny as a piece of rubbish at Blaxland (Aug 2017)
Fibre nescience: Do consumers really need data transfer rates that only fibre can provide?
(Liberal Party of Australia, 2013)


Mothballed satellite dishes in Rozelle, in Sydney's East (Jan 2013)
X-out & scroll: First they came for the workers, then it was our turn


Gomo Sportswear prior to its demolition, Granville (Jul 2017)
In the days of the citizen journalist: We no longer needed broadcast quality equipment to reach a global audience


Journalists at the Sydney Opera House (Jul 2014)
Orderly exodus: When we were finally done, we got into our white vans and simply disappeared


Toyota HiAce vans await delivery at Penrith (Apr 2017)
Formalism Concrete: Move fast
(Facebook, 2014)and break things with stable infrastructure


Indigo Slam at Chippendale (Jul 2017)
Sci-Fi Now: Superconducting NbTi coils; Holmium magnetic flux condensers; 4°K liquid helium insulated within a liquid nitrogen jacket; A suitcase-sized helium condenser; A FFT-processing rack more powerful than a dozen 1980s mainframes… A 3T magnetic field from a machine the size of a small car, to obtain millimetre resolution internal body images without a single incision. Twenty years earlier no one would have believed any of this was possible…


The 3T MRI scanner at a medical imaging practice at Penrith, in Sydney (Sep 2013)
Big data and the cloud: Off-line storage by the petabyte → provided your network connection was fast enough → provided your resellers didn't vanish overnight…


Mobile phone tower and clouds from a summer storm, at Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains (Dec 2012)
Nostalgic Futurism: The Eighties didn't quite get the future right


The now dismantled Sydney Monorail at One Dixon Street, Sydney's Chinatown (Jan 2012)
Rust-belt agriculture: I'd rather put my trust in looking at the sheep and seeing how it performs, than in some number dreamed up by some scientists on a bit of paper
(Merriman, 2012)


Farm sculpture, Cathedral Street Woolloomooloo (Jul 2018)
Cut-through messaging: Make your mark, repeat, move on


Vandalised rail-car at the Zigzag railway, Clarence (Jul 2019)
Lifespans & outcomes: We no longer needed to dread living longer lives


Anzac Day marcher, Liverpool Street Sydney (Apr 2018)
Encouraging the right choice: How were private toll-roads ever going to make any money if people didn't use them?


Abandoned bus at Opoho Road, Dunedin NZ (Dec 2017)
Edgy by order: We created zeitgeisty environments in which start-ups could prosper


Disposable bicycles on Pitt Str, outside World Square (Jan 2018)
The spam massif: We facilitated a global network of unsolicited urgent messages


Sydney University public noticeboards (Oct 2017)
It just works: Release now, patch later


Jensen Avenue at Dover Heights (Nov 2016)
Fabricating nostalgia: A lot was said about the impacts of deindustrialisation, but few missed the unimaginative, backbreaking and life-threatening work


Davy press at ATP Eveleigh Workshops museum (Sep 2017)
Linear ascension: Those who could afford to do so, raced toward an off-grid future


Cars race along the Eastern Distributor at Woolloomooloo (Jul 2018)
Ascend the upgrade escalator: Every nine months there was always something better


York Street escalators, Wynyard station (Jul 2018)
Faisal's footprints: The engine warning light came on in October 1973, but we covered it over and kept going


Abandoned shops (since demolished), Parramatta Road Homebush (Jun 2016)
Stasi without the politics: The keepsake pulled from your private social-media account; HD-CCTV; IP address logging; Cookie tracking; EFTPOS transaction records; Data-mining; Phone-hacking; The Twitter account under a false-name; Location-sensitive personalised mobile marketing; Uρ-skirting/ dοwn-blοusing; Instagram selfies gone viral — the belief you could predict future consumer demand by knowing everything about your customers today


Satellite, UHF and cable communications at Marrickville, in Sydney (Sep 2012)
The point of the spear: All problems for the Kamikaze had exactly the same solution


Lockheed A-12 engine aerospike at the Intrepid Museum, NYC (Oct 2017)
We adored you more than our children: You were our greatest and most cherished asset. For you brought us light and jobs and windfall profits, and glistened so beautifully in the dying sun


Anthracite in Lithgow, NSW (Jun 2019)
Really just organised lightning: Everything depended upon wave-particles that two hundred years earlier no-one imagined existed


33kV AC transmission tower outside the Penrith Transmission Substation (Jul 2011)
Project attention deficit disorder: Every Prague Spring had its tanks


Construction cranes at the Central Park development at Broadway, in Sydney (Oct 2012)
We couldn't imagine being without our cars: It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency
(NYTimes, 2015)


One of millions of automobiles, gleaming in the driveway of a Point Piper cottage in Sydney's east (Sep 2012)
Peace through superior fire-power: Build it and they will die


Vought F-8 Crusader at the Intrepid Museum, NYC (Oct 2017)