The Ephemeral Age: Keys to understand fast times and scheduled obsolescence
About this ebook
The legacy we are leaving may be as weak as the volatile magnetic memories in which we back it up. But have we ever thought about that?
We live in perpetual change, but it seems to accelerate more and more. From smartphones to screens, computers, and devices, they all last less in our hands. Almost like the same applications we use, which delete photos and videos in 24 hours or before. It is not a coincidence.
Personalities and celebrities who are born in the morning and at night are already forgotten. All silent witnesses of a superfluous, momentary time that does not wait for anyone. Symbols of the incessant bustle that, far from being the exception, are the norm of our modernity. From the virtual neighborhoods in Geocities to the ubiquitous story modes that plague all applications today, ephemeral by default. Increasingly virtual and digital realities, which blur the difference between the real world and the computer world.
This little book is a series of quick reflections to help us understand that volatility is both technological, as well as a reflection of the stormy and restless contemporary human soul. The result of a turbulent time of which, perhaps, no memory will remain.
Ratings and reviews
- Flag inappropriate
- Show review history
About the author
Hi, I'm Byron Rizzo. I am an independent Argentinean writer born in Neuquén, in the North of Patagonia and South of the rest of the world, a land full of stories and lacking people.
I came into the world in the allegorical year 1990. The influence of the decade can be intuited in every interest, taste, and lyrics of my authorship. From the literary presence of magical realism to the patronage of Japanese anime, or the obsession with music from around the world. I have been writing or trying to (with results at the reader's discretion) since a very young age. Antes de que te des cuenta, published in 2021, dates back to when I was 10 to give an example.
Adolescence and youth saw me publishing in digital media of all kinds, ephemeral as the time we have to live. Many of them have already disappeared, luckily for my modesty, like my own and borrowed blogs. Like a Fotolog page in which I dedicated those few 5000 characters per post, to go through the history of Rock, Britpop, Shoegaze, Jazz, and more. First rehearsals of showing my art to others. Some instead can still be found online, such as my articles on technology, culture, video games, digital archaeology, networks, nostalgia, and computing at Tecnovortex.
My published books deal with related, contemporary topics, and walk between genres. Science fiction, cyberpunk culture, fantastic tales of horror adapted to an era almost without secrets to the naked eye, and other concerns of current cyberspace. I seek to write about the time we have placed in to live, finding like the masters of literature before me the magic and mysteries hidden in the machines.
Starting in 2020, I began publishing those same concerns in book format, being the first Videogames & Addiction: Game Over. An essay and anecdote about my great hobby and art of the new century. At the end of that same year the first fiction to see the light was Polypticon, a (no longer so) dystopian epistolary novel through chats and messages on forums. That fiction was soon accompanied by works such as El Sonido, a novel about isolation and obsession. Conoces a Tsuki-chan?, which deals with human-digital transmigration. Or VA-Tek, a transhumanist Neo-Gothic literary experiment mixing alchemy and quantum computing. All of them live in the same expansive universe, in which I plan to continue publishing books.
I appreciate you getting to this point. I invite you to follow my path and value my books, letting me become another secondary character in the narrative of your life. One that I hope you enjoy and enriches your own story.
