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@@ -6,6 +6,12 @@ Your power is proportional to your ability to relax.
 
 The primary tools that one needs in modern day culture are to know how to make things up, and how to figure things out. This is creativity in two of its forms. These are called imagination and problem-solving. —STEVEN SNYDER
 
+Technology is a means to an end, not an end
+
+---
+S.M. Stirling’s characters*. “History becomes myth, myth becomes legend, and legend becomes history [as people act it out in their deeds]. Time is not a straight line. Time is a serpent.”
+
+*The character was our old friend The Wanderer, here seen as an old mountain man in a sheepskin poncho, making coffee over a campfire – who suddenly, for an instant, is also seen with long black braids, a black Stetson, and the face of Coyote Old Man. 
 ---
 
 In his 1870 essay What is Authority?, Bakunin wrote:
@@ -44,9 +50,9 @@ Thoreau's writing on nature and his own inner expereinces is just something you
 
 This is what struck me about Walden when I recently reread it: that it starts with something very practical, very bound up in 19th century Concord, very grounded you might say in the world of its day, and yet ends up in place that is very spiritual. It struck me because I have had exactly the same experience. 
 
-In getting in the bus I did not set out to step away from society. I have not stepped away from it at all. I am typing this using grid powered electricity, listen to the cacophony of helicopter rides while staring at the dense Florida branbles around our campsite, which, were I to bushwack through them, would lead me to the Walmart parking lot where I stocked up on steak, eggs and veggies not four hours ago. I am in Concord. And yet I am not. I understand now HD.
+In getting in the bus I did not set out to step away from society. I have not stepped away from it at all. I am typing this using grid powered electricity, listen to the cacophony of helicopter rides while staring at the dense Florida branbles around our campsite, which, were I to bushwack through them, would lead me to the Walmart parking lot where I stocked up on steak, eggs and veggies not four hours ago. I am in Concord. And yet I am not. I understand now HD. And I also see both your flaws and mine. 
 
-And I also see both your flaws and mine. 20th-century French anthropologist René Girard's mimetic theory takes this idea of Thoreau's -- that we do not want things a vacuum, we want them because other people want them -- and reminds us that when you leave behind one certain mimetic process, you always enter into another one. You might not want a big fancy house, but you might want a really cool vintage RV, or a particular sailboat. Something will always fill that vacuum on desire and unless you're really on your toes -- and I certainly am not -- chances are that thing that fills it will again be something you don't actually a) need b) want, save because someone else has it.
+20th-century French anthropologist René Girard's mimetic theory takes this idea of Thoreau's -- that we do not want things a vacuum, we want them because other people want them -- and reminds us that when you leave behind one certain mimetic process, you always enter into another one. You might not want a big fancy house, but you might really want a cool vintage RV, or a particular sailboat. Something will always fill that vacuum of desire and unless you're really on your toes -- and I certainly am not -- chances are that thing that fills it will again be something you don't need at all and only want because someone else has it. 
 
 
 What one needs to do is question the forces which are pulling them. Mimetic desire runs deep, so deep that most of it is simply accepted as opposed to worked with. What I mean by this is that the majority of items we have and actions we undertake are not acquired or undertaken out of conscious wanting, but out of the general acceptance that they and that is what you do/get. People have 3-piece sofas, fridges, tons of cutlery and plates, nic-nacs, new cars, new phones etc. People go to school, have kids, get mortgages, take out loans, perform Christmas day etc. And all of this falls under the idea of 'It's just want you do.' In fact, perhaps that's a good place to finish up, as I've just found my new favorite slogan...
@@ -130,12 +136,6 @@ https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/08/what-in-the-world-is-the-world-a-revi
 
 ---
 
-Early in my blogging days, I reflected a bit on the nature of technology criticism. In my view, the technology critic was not necessarily motivated by a love of their object in the same way that a food critic or film critic might be. “The critic of technology is a critic of artifacts and systems that are always for the sake of something else,” I observed. To put it another way, we run into problems precisely when we start treating technology as an end rather than a means to an end. This is not to say that we can’t be legitimately impressed with technical achievements on their own terms, of course, or admire the skill that makes them possible. But we do well to also judge technologies according to the greater ends they help us realize and critique them to the degree that they undermine the achievement of such ends.
-
-https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/what-is-to-be-done-fragments
-
----
-
 Paul Kingsnorth on solutions:
 
 Climate change is a great example of that. It’s really interesting to me that we talk about climate change as if it were somehow disconnected from all the other things that are happening to the planet. The industrial economy’s assault on the earth, which has been going on for a couple hundred years, has basically wrecked the health of the planet in all sorts of different ways. And there are a lot of things happening — large rates of extinction, soil erosion, ocean pollution, a changing climate, all sorts of smaller, subtler things as well — but it’s climate change that’s just a one-off, almost self-contained phenomenon that has somehow grabbed the headlines and has become this enormous thing that we somehow have to stop. That’s the problem, so what’s the solution? And the solution inevitably is always technological, because nobody can think about anything else. That’s the way we think in our culture: we’ve created the problem with technology, so we must have to solve it with technology. So the issue has boiled down to, the wrong kind of gas is going up into the atmosphere, so we need a fuel technology that doesn’t put it up there, as if that were the problem, rather than the way we’re living our lives, the entirety of the economy, the value system that it’s based on. It’s the kind of notion that we’re extractive individuals and we just live in a market system. All of these complex things have happened over the last hundred years where we’ve completely retooled the way we live — we’ve disconnected ourselves from nature and culture and community, and we’ve made ourselves consumer individuals living in a machine. And the problem then is seen as, the Machine is using the wrong fuel, so let’s do something else. It’s not going to work, anyway, but even if it did work, what would the solution look like? Is that the world we want to be living in? Are the values correct? Is our disconnection okay as long as it doesn’t pollute the atmosphere? Is it okay to live in this kind of radical individualistic machine world as long as we’re not putting carbon up into the air?
@@ -1628,9 +1628,9 @@ It’s probably cheaper and easier to buy most things, but when I can I’d rath
 
 ## Safety Third
 
-If you land on luxagraf.net on an odd day of the month, you might notice the little tag line under the site title is "safety third". This comes from a sticker we saw on a pole outside the [Henry Miller Library](https://henrymiller.org) in [Big Sur California](). Whoever put it there had read their Miller because he would have agreed. Actually he would have probably ranked safety much lower. I often do.
+If you land on luxagraf.net on an odd day of the month, you might notice the little tag line under the site title is "safety third". This comes from a sticker we saw on a pole outside the [Henry Miller Library](https://henrymiller.org) in [Big Sur, California](https://images.luxagraf.net/2017/2017-11-28_161158_monterey_picwide.jpg). Miller no doubt would have agreed. He might have ranked safety even lower in his decision calculus. I often do.
 
-The sticker and its motto became something of a family joke. Whenever we did something other people might have frowned on inevitably someone would shout, "Safety third!" and we'd go do whatever it was.
+The sticker and its motto became something of a family joke. Whenever we did something other people might have frowned on, someone would shout, "Safety third!" and we'd go do whatever it was.
 
 Over time I began to feel less jokey about it. I've come to see our culture's obsession with safety as one of the key axes on which our world is turning, and I don't like where it's leading us. It's not a place I want to go, it's not a place I want my kids to go. I think safety first is the reason we had a worldwide panic over Covid, it's the reason so many young adults are meek and unable to handle the world, it's the reason our leaders are failing us, and it's a big part of the reason so many people are dissatisfied with their lives.