Long-time webizens know that the controversial Ken Rockwell has a lot to say. He is both revered and reviled on the web, but remains popular in any case.

One concept he explored years ago was “futuretrash,” the idea that technology is inherently inclined to advance so fast that almost all tech machinations will be obsolete in a short period of time, like months or just a few years.

The article is ten years old, but it’s just as relevant today, particularly after I half-jokingly got on Ebay and bought 22 untested old digital cameras for just $10. They arrived a couple of days later, and my wife Abby and I have been playing with them ever since.

The oldest camera of the bunch appears to be from 1998, a Kodak DC210 Plus. The front of the camera brags “MegaPixel,” and the web confirms that yes, it is a one megapixel camera. The web also indicates that this behemoth originally cost $899. No, I am not making that up; that’s almost $1400 in today’s dollars.

Just for the record, one of these cameras, a Nikon Pronea S, is a film camera from the APS era.

The price of digital cameras fell for years, in accordance with Moore’s Law, so by 2008, this camera had been replaced with much better, much cheaper technology. Still, even the newest and best of this batch of untested cameras must have cost at least $300. To get them all for just $10 says this: what was once valuable is now garbage.

About a third of these cameras work. Some of them take AA batteries, while some require proprietary batteries I don’t have. Most of them use the ubiquitous SD card, while a few take CF cards. Two of them take SmartMedia, which I don’ t have, and one requires an SD Picture Card, which was in it when it arrived. A Sony Cybershot had a Memory Stick in it.

But I didn’t buy them to take pictures. I certainly have enough modern cameras for that. I bought them to ponder what we really value in a capitalist/merchentilist society from the perspective of someone in my area of expertise. Are we really asking the human race to throw away college savings, mortgage payments, health care, retirement, and any number of other once truly valuable things so we could take 20 or 30 1.2-megapixel digital photographs of our niece’s graduation?

Flash forward 20 years to now, and the real reason these cameras are in a pile in a box at the bottom of the coat closet is this: we have been brainwashed to believe we need to take tens of thousands of photographs of our lives with increasingly complex and sophisticated tools (iPhones for example), instead of living our lives?

Yes, I see this all the time: people watching their children grow up on the screens of their phones. And I can’t be certain, but my guess is that only a tiny fraction of these images and videos are ever seen again.

So, Richard, photographer and photography instructor, what is your bottom line? Quality over quantity? That we should all be artists? That we should turn off our phones and smell the marigolds once in a while? All this and more. Life is worth living instead of watching, and while photography can be a powerful tool for recording our lives, it shouldn’t take the place of our lives.