21. Conversations With Things

You know what a ghost box is? They pre-date EVP. It's said that Thomas Edison tried to make one once. There's a whole community of ghost box makers on the net today, right alongside the ghost detector people and the Instrumental Trans-Communication people (add ITC to EIF and RFID). A ghost box is an electromagnetic device for communicating with ghosts through radio waves. Some ghost boxes claim two-way communication, in fact. Conversations with things that are not alive as we commonly understand the word "alive" to mean.

I imagine most of the people here at this conference in Berlin have one of those in their pockets.

And by "conversations with things that are not alive" and all that, I don't mean phone calls with family members and dumped boyfriends.

That's a bit of a mundane digital-city future, though, I suppose – having to communicate with the ghosts through a glowing box. And also a bit expensive for many city dwellers, I would think. Although possibly I'm just cheap.