#a85 :: Australian stamps

The lickety-split digitization of all human commerce runs into a brick wall when it comes to sending physical messages.

Until mass production sufficiently cuts the cost of 3-D printing and, viagra thus, the 3-D fax, humans must carry hand-made documents and machine-made objects from one place to another.

To subsidize the cost of the trucks, trains, planes and numb-minded civil servants who move our stuff, we rely on the most archaic and quaint of constructs: A law requiring us to buy elaborately-printed squares of paper and glue them onto packages to prove we’ve paid for the service.

This odd lot of Australian stamps came into the house as a gift and is handsomely shrink-wrapped and labeled – oddly – “GIFT.” Which mirrors the same sort of moebius-strip recursion that gave rise to the practice of using postage stamps in the first place.

Or maybe I’m overthinking it. Again.