Friday, January 8, 2016

Drawing Further

Technology and nature
Pushing and pulling 


Technology believes in its own world
That it is the machine
The machine that has always been - will always be 
A separate world, where the units keep flowing
Units of currency, iron, power, people
But the nature of any- and every- pulls back at the machine
-Man
-Thing 
-

Sunday, October 25, 2015

beasts


i am the beast who constantly wonders

why all of the beasts collectively blunder

Monday, October 12, 2015

Holding On

The pervading dialogue places the power to shape the world within humanities hands. We can systematically change the world as we please. The pervasion of humanity into nature is immense, and provides us with immense confidence. We dominate our perspective.
A perspective shift reveals reality. The indifferent hand of humanity remains surrounded by the forces that created us. 

Friday, October 9, 2015

Remediation


The dam holds back the river, creating temporary stillness where before existed either rapids or no water at all.

The intermittent stream flows sometimes much, sometimes none. Not in the middle, the dam's reality.

The equilibrium is not punctuated sufficiently with a dam. The locks may open when the torrent comes knocking on the door, but can they open fast enough?

The river tugs on. Begging its surroundings to come, swim down to ocean. Will we? Waiting has its virtues.

We see through the dam, to the forest waiting beyond. We know that the forest came before the dam, but can we be sure that it comes after? Technology says no in its eternal quest for self preservation and expansion. Technology does not know, it comprehends only what we feed it, and we feed it forests enough to understand that forests are expendable in the face of progress and growth.



The culture of progress demands forests, demands rivers, consumes and forgets them as the world of electricity and rectangles pervades their worldview.

The culture of forgetfulness, of moving rapidly from one technology to the next, flittering from one entertaining moment to the next. The capacity for amusement is immense. True knowledge of self forgotten for the industrial entertainment of TV and the depths of the internet anti-social media.
I OWN YOU.
Turn it off. 
Can we turn it off? Or are we too deep down the technological rabbit hole that holds an amusing depth of vice and narcissism?

Business as usual, for now. 

The question remains, if this is the path, where does knowledge diverge from progress? Where does sustainability diverge from technology?

Why?

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Welcome to the Machine

Welcome my son, Welcome to the Machine.



Remains wholly relevant today, the man is well engrossed in the machine, digging his way to deeper technology with every breath of the word progress. The world certainly does progress on.

"The clock indicates the moment . . . but what does eternity indicate?"

The river flows on forever. It may pass us by, or it may sweep us by in the current. Far beyond where we can conceive our landing, we will land.
We may remain, or we may forget ourselves and our link to eternity, the unbroken chain of success that has led DNA to win over the world with technology and blindness.

Fighting the current is a fruitless endeavor, but am I ready to seize the bank, should it draw close? To draw my way out, and to see what is, what has been, and what will be?

The collective is blind to empathy, the common thread of empathy, of all-one, is more of an all none.
For now, at least.

The world thrives effervescently on.
For now, at least.




Monday, September 7, 2015

Remainders



I remain convinced. 


If only I could say the same.

The world turns indifferently on,

The clock ticks on, while we amuse ourselves in ever new ways.

The attention is lost to screen world.

The framework of the world remains constant,

while the reference viewpoint shifts.

The bibically granted dominion of mankind over nature pervades.

What dividend does the biodiversity of the earth yield? Something grander than my conception.

If an alien race were to commence observation of mankind now, what would they see?

A world of nations, gradually tying a globalized net of capital closer and closer.

A people divided, without the empathy required to draw themselves closer.


A high degree of entropy, or,
forgetting that to make something you must break something else.

We break the earth in exchange for making technologies. They amuse and confuse us, connect and separate us.

Why?

The sea of clouds indifferently blinds mankind, alone atop its mountain, to the path that brought us here.
The path that will bring us home to earth.


"We're lost in space, but the earth is our home" - Steve Miller

Saturday, August 22, 2015

Autonomous Autos

Composed in response to:
http://worldif.economist.com/article/11/what-if-autonomous-vehicles-rule-the-world-from-horseless-to-driverless

I don't leave the article feeling convinced. As the 'luxury' of self driving cars begins to trickle down, freeing those already with the means to pay from their car insurance payments, a whole lot of low skill, fairly high wage jobs (trucking) will be rolled under the carpet of progress.
What a miracle of economics! 

Cabbing has already begun the descent into joblessness. Uber's civil disobedience has allowed them immense market share at the expense of the established driver-company-municipality triumvirate, and the whole while they trumpet the immense money saving potential of removing their own drivers in addition to the existing cab companies and drivers.

I see the immense fleets of self driving cars replacing most private cars, but I do not see that as liberating, as insurance providers will latch on to those without the means to pay reliably for the subscription-service that will surely arise. Those saddled with exorbitant premiums will be least likely to be able to afford them. 

Perhaps a more admirable solution would be to take a step back to reexamine the 50's era urban planning practices that are linking American cities inextricably from the mantra of more cars all the time. A new city should arise, that has residents healthy and wise enough to want to spend their time to work enjoying the fresh air on the bike, or perhaps riding an electric train. Bikes and trains introduce far less entropy into the system than cars do, with their immense concrete infrastructures. 
The development in the city may have many new apartments, but take a step out into the country and you will see the cul-de-sac trees blooming off into eternity. 

Why does the American dream need to involve consuming America?