We've been working on this barn-style door for the garage and upon looking over and reflecting on the tools we've been using, I've been struck with an odd sensation: many of our modern tools, implements, and general technologies are really just remarkable. The layers and layers of ingenuity and rigor of thought and practice, the sediments of complexity built over one another, they're just baffling. When you go back to the basics and begin building things yourself and seeing how things actually work, and what you are capable of without more advanced tools and industrial processes, a stark contrast is drawn between simpler implements and contemporary technologies. I was just looking at a simple crowbar and marveling at its contours, and the precision and deliberation of its design. All the more so for the table saw, and the endlessly complex manufacturing processes behind these tools.
Which is all the more strange of a sensation considering the dumb, mean, and cruel culture that continues to gestate atop it all. Dumb, mean, and cruel advertisements plaster these towering, gorgeous structures downtown. Dumb, mean and cruel television is piped into beautiful homes on beautiful electronic screens, broadcasted miles and miles away from towers on electromagnetic waves, or broadcasted from space. Dumb, mean, and cruel radio shows and adverts play to impatient and insensitive drivers in these incredible automobiles driving over these breathtaking bridges, engineering marvels spanning oceans, hanging there in the sun like glistening steel spider webs.
Of course, now come the qualifications. Yes, on one hand, I know all of the culture has not turned: there is a still a diverse range of opinions and expressions. Good media is still to be found. And there is always independent activity to consider. Good things are happening in certain places, even in the public sphere. And on the other hand there are various stupid technologies or manufactured objects that are rapidly declining in quality. Our powers of manipulation are awe-inspiring but one has to raise questions about the scope of this manipulation, the energy it consumes, and the indirect effects it has on the greater systems that sustain it. There is no apparent on/off switch. The process of manipulation takes off in all directions and won't stop until it burns itself out.
I'm just trying to deal in aggregates right now. Painting a limited picture so to speak. Yeah, it is all just a bit strange: this great machine sitting and cooling after a violent expansion, inside of which persists a continuous rot.
