Pty Ltd

“Everything was filled with sperm.” Such was the attitude of 17th century whalers as presented in Herman Melville’s unintentionally-suggestive-on-several-accounts classic, Moby Dick. Here, of course, sperm is an abbreviation of the sterile oil spermaceti found most abundantly in a sperm whale’s head, and harvested for use as lamp fodder pre the rise of petroleum. Back then, sperm was considered a limitless resource as the marine mammals producing it were thought to be unlimited. “We account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable his individuality.” Even though each year off the American coast alone, some 13 000 physeter macrocephalus’ were slaughtered for their sperm [1]. No one even attempted to estimate global whale populations until the 1970s. I mean, why would they? It’s not as if these folks relied on whales for any critical purpose, such as providing light. Prior to the large commercial uptake of whaling c. 1800, the global sperm whale population exceeded 1.1 million. Over the next eighty years, this number dropped by 29% [2]. And now, after a second, modern wave of whale hunting in the 1900s, we are thought to have less than 400 k spermy boys swimming our seas. 

The same happens for every resource humanity encounters. “Well, lookie here, there’s endless black bears and hence endless pelts in this God-graced state of Mississippi” [3]. And, “Fuck, this coal stuff just keeps comin' out of the ground beneath me feet.” And, “Geez, trees just grow from nothing. Look at these unbounded forests that’ll take literally forever to fell.” As our population runs headlong toward Earth’s carrying capacity, we’re forced to consider the extent of resources that were effectively limitless in the past. And this has bread a skepticism in millennials and surrounding generations for anything claiming to be unlimited.

Sure, we might transfer to renewables, but all these energy sources rely upon the sun, a ball of gas that’s going to gutter out one day. And despite the tacky Canva-made quotes that middle-aged mums so love to share on Facebook, studies show that even ‘Love’ is limited to approximately Dunbar’s Number (150) [4]. And counter to several 18th century philosophers and writers (who these mums also seem to promote), imagination is limited too—go on, try to picture a colour outside of our spectrum, or conceive of and understand a universe in which the product of one and one is four. Even time—yes, even the concept of forever is finite; at the heat death of the universe, when there is no motion or change of states, there can be no progression of anything. So when Dodo, TPG or iiNet offer unlimited downloads per month, I’m skeptical. I’m uber-conservative when downloading because it’s got to exhaust itself somehow, right?

This instinctive reservation is no doubt aggravated by my upbringing in a time where downloads were actually capped. At fifteen, my household was limited to 20 GB per month, which, when exceeded, would force our internet speeds to regress to dial-up era velocities, and I would be stuck watching anime frame by frame in 120 p. I took precautions to avoid this: ripped and stored parkour videos I wanted to watch several times over, listened to Limewire’s Jack Johnson in 32 kbps, preloaded One Piece episodes using Bishop Druitt Library Wi-Fi, and, most difficult of all, restricted myself to only twelve pornographic sessions per week. Towards the end of each month, Mum would interrogate around the dinner table, “Who’s been using all the internet?” And I would never admit it was me.

Nowadays, when I see that a single episode of some HBO show costs 2 GB to download, my eyes still dilate, my heat skips, and my stomach still sinks with dismay. It’s an added stress that I get nothing out of, that I don’t need. Because today, download quantity is effectively limitless, and my unshakeable skepticism is only hurting me.

Only one resource in this world seems boundless: grain. Specifically, cereal grains: quinoa, rice, barley, buckwheat, amaranth, oats. Put what appears to be one serving in a pot with some water and watch the resultant product fill the stomachs of ten strong men. Once, on a trip to the snow, I made porridge for five of my friends. I mixed rolled oats, water, milk, salt and heat, and the contents proliferated before my eyes. It bulked out to about thirty serves in the end and my environmentalist/waste-intolerant friend bagged up sandwich bags of the gruel to eat cold on the Thredbo chairlifts. And I thought, Rolled oats have no end. 

The Brothers Grimm were bang on in their fairytale Sweet Porridge (a.k.a. The Magic Porridge Pot) which, if you’re unaware, tells the story of a young poverty-stricken girl who acquires a bottomless pot. Upon the command, “Porridge Pot, cook,” the vessel produced endless quantities of porridge. Upon the command, “Porridge Pot, stop,” the vessel—you guessed it—stopped. The quality of the output oatmeal is omitted from the text. One would think that given the saucepan favours quantity, the quality of the gruel would suffer, both in terms of flavour, texture and nutrition. Perhaps this is why our poverty-stricken protagonist flees the village one fateful day, to search for something other than tasteless gruel, a decision she will soon come to regret because it so happens that on this day, the poverty-stricken girl’s poverty-stricken mother decides to make porridge for herself. The mother says, “Porridge Pot, cook.” And the vessel obeys the command. And the mother eats until sated. And then she fails to make the saucepan stop. 

The porridge proliferates, grows over the lip of the saucepan and onto the bench top, fills the kitchen, leaks out onto the street until there're rivers of gruel through the entire village, a flood of non-newtonian fluid shear-thinning its way through the town. At this point one questions the distress level of the poverty-stricken mother. Surely she would’ve tried with all her might and cognitive power to stop the incessant production. The Brothers Grimm wave away the mother’s inability to stop the saucepan by saying, “… she did not know the word.” But, given that she knew the start command (“Porridge Pot, cook”) and would’ve obviously been shouting potential stop commands in desperation, how did she not happen upon the correct word, stop? Is this commentary from The Brothers? A nod to the 17th century monarcho-capitalist idea that all poor persons are dumb? Or perhaps a message with a nutritional agenda suggesting that too much gruel will turn your brain to mush. We aren’t given any examples of what the mother shouted at the saucepan to get it to stop, but one hopes she would’ve been smart enough to at least use the on-command as a template: “Porridge Pot, don’t do it anymore.” Or, “Porridge Pot, cease production.” Or, “Porridge Pot, discontinue your endless, conservation-of-energy breaking generation of edible matter!” 

Luckily, the poverty-stricken girl returns home before gruel covers the globe, and commands the saucepan to stop. The single sentence epilogue in the original fairytale (“… whosoever wished to return to the town had to eat his way back.”) tells us that the girl, having“returned” to town, would’ve had to consume her way through swathes of oatmeal to get back, a perfect punishment for the pauper who (we’ve inferred) aspired to eat greater things. The Brothers reinforce their capitalistic ideals. “Sucked in, you poverty-stricken girl!” They say. “That’s what you get for being poor.”

As a child, my Magic Porridge Pot picture book put a modern and disturbing twist on the epilogue. “The whole town is still eating porridge,” it said. What kind of sick world do we live in? I know the 1700s were unsanitary times (non-sterilised surgical scalpels, faecal-contaminated drinking wells, garbage rotting in the street), but eating three-century old gruel from the ground is on another level. It’s probably been waded through and shat in by cattle, sunbaked, waterlogged, turned like crop fields, tracked into houses and then tracked back out again, and these people are still eating it, still ingesting what I assume is now one great sea of grey-green mould, disgusting. There’s no mention in the original or modern editions of the townsfolk cleaning it up, transferring it to more sanitary vessels, likely because there was simply too much porridge to store. And it is from this angle that I should consider internet downloads: not as being limited (because effectively, they’re not), but as taking up storage, storage which is capped.

Just as oatmeal-encumbrance would’ve quadrupled commute times, my laptop has to shift back five gears and engage 4WD when stuffed to brimming with bytes. When downloading, I should visualise each incoming bit as a grain of rolled oat beamed through optics from a limitless supply. And each movie or show or picture I keep, I should consider as oatmeal cooked. And I must balance my intake with a regular excretion so I don’t end up like a certain poverty-stricken girl in Porridge Town.