Simo / What It Replaced

What the pocket looks like now, and what it costs.

Consolidation is efficient right up until the single object fails.

Carrying less is a real gain and should be said plainly. A person can leave the house with a rectangle and a key and be equipped for a working day, a train trip, a meal out and an unplanned detour. The previous version of that day required a bag. Bags get left behind, and things fall out of them. Consolidation removed a whole category of small daily losses, and it removed the low grade calculation about what to bring, which took up more attention than anyone credited at the time.

The cost of consolidation is that all the eggs travel in one basket, and the basket is made of glass and is regularly balanced on the arm of a chair. A single drop can end the day's photographs, the way home, the means of payment and the ability to tell anyone about it. Redundancy used to be free, because the functions lived in separate objects that failed at separate times. Now redundancy has to be deliberate, and deliberate redundancy feels like fuss until the morning it does not.

In practice most people arrive at a modest hedge without ever announcing it. A note of an address written down before a long trip. A physical card kept somewhere other than the phone case. A key that opens a door without any electronics involved. A friend's number on a scrap of paper in a wallet. None of this is preparation for catastrophe. It is the same instinct that puts a spare tyre in a boot: not a prediction of a puncture, just an acknowledgement that one object doing everything is a strong arrangement with one obvious weakness.