HP never stopped innovating. From its origins in the 1930s as a leading electronics manufacturer to its role in the birth of PCs and performance servers, it has always demonstrated incredible ingenuity.
Today, that ingenuity is deployed in service of evil ink-based fuckery.
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The printer-ink business model has always been a form of commercial sadism in which you are expected to put giant manufacturers' interests ahead of your own with no expectation of any sort of reciprocity.
After all, when your profits depend on charging more for ink than vintage Veuve-Clicquot, you need to get up to some serious shenanigans to get your customers to drain their bank accounts to fill their printers.
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One of the great delights of this decade is @Scarfolk, @richard_littler's long-running art-project about a English horror-town trapped in an endless, looping Thatcherite decade, whose artifacts are pitch-perfect comments on our own daily lives.
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The period Littler focuses on - the dawn of neoliberalism - is a turning point in our collective timeline, the ascendant moment of selfishness, the elevation of sociopathy to a virtue, the moment in which corporate personhood was elevated at the expense of human personhood.
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As such, the parallels he is able to draw are incredible, savage and brilliant, augmented by his biting prose and his superb draftsmanship and outstanding design.
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