The Loaf and the Laptop

A loaf of bread and a laptop computer are of rather similar weight and volume. Both are products of human artifice and draw for their manufacture on a range of materials and techniques. Yet the loaf has been around for at least eight thousand years, whereas the laptop computer has been with us for no more than forty. And while both the loaf and the laptop are embedded in wider fields of social, spatial and temporal relations, the principles on which these relations rest are diametrically opposed. This lecture asks: which of these two things will outlast the other? Will the future be one of laptops without loaves, or loaves without laptops.