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Found in the archives of the Museum of Human Technology, New Singapore, 2084. Author unknown. Catalogued under "Early Electronic Wearable Culture, 2020s."
Dear whoever finds this,
I'm writing from what they now call the early period. You probably know it as the decade when humans started wearing electronic minerals on their bodies — before it became standard, before the integration laws, before the Gemstone Census.
In our time, it was just an earphone.
I remember the first time I put one on. It was a small object — Tiger's Eye, the warm one — and it clipped onto my ear without a piercing. It played music through the air next to my ear canal. Not inside it. Next to it. The people who made it called this "open-ear," which sounded strange at the time.
But the music wasn't the point. The point was that someone asked me what it was. I told them it was an earphone. They looked confused. "It looks like jewelry," they said. "It looks like a stone."
It was both. That was new.
The company that made it called themselves OF HUNGER. The name referred to a kind of wanting — not for food but for expression, for beauty on the body, for technology that didn't hide from the world. They had a phrase: designed to be seen. At the time, it was radical. Now, of course, it's obvious. Everything is designed to be seen. The body has become a surface for electronic expression in ways they could barely imagine.
They called their concept body electronicization. We call it simply living.
They named their products after minerals — Zircon, Opal, Tiger's Eye. Minerals that had been forming inside the Earth for billions of years before anyone thought to turn them into a name for something electronic. I think they understood, even then, that the strongest ideas borrow their identity from deep time.
I wonder what you call them now. In our time, they were called Electronic Gems. I imagine the name has changed. The objects have probably changed too — smaller, or larger, or integrated into the ear itself.
But I hope the principle survived. The principle that technology on the body should be beautiful. That it should be chosen. That it should say something about the person wearing it, the way a ring or a scar or a tattoo does.
If that principle survived, then we did something right.
Yours,
An early wearer
