Paul Kingsnorth, saying something similar to my post from yesterday: The alternative [to living for the Machine] has always been the same, for millennia, across the world. The alternative is self-denial. It is living within limits, refusing to consume for the Machine, refusing to give the Total System what it wants. It is planting your feet on the ground, living modestly, refusing technology that will enslave you in the name of freedom.
Excellent post by Caroline Ross on the value of small talk:
As a form of simple hospitality, a few words about the weather cannot be beaten, they show interest, friendliness, openness to conversation. They put people at their ease. They show we are not above everybody else.
David Hinton: Within the West’s epochal cultural transformation, [Robinson] Jeffers held a crucial place. Although caught in the terminological limitations bequeathed him by his pantheistic forebears, he was a radical step beyond them. His vision was fundamentally post-Christian, for it was not at all human-centered. He valued wild earth in and of itself, for its own self-realization—not for how it can benefit or inspire humanity. And from this came Jeffers’ earth-based ethics—that we should love the whole, not the human alone—an ethics that led him to say “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.
Jack Leahy: [All ideologies seek to] contain the uncontainable cosmos in rational, propositional thought in order to fix it. But the cosmos and the earth are not flawed systems that can be reduced to their atomic parts and then rebuilt perfectly to our own ever-changing and unstable desires. In our attempt, we must reduce the mind-boggling complexity and vastness of reality to a set of knowable propositions. Everything, therefore, will be reduced in order to be comprehended.
Distraction is nothing other than a way to avoid, in the short term, the radical discomfort of the necessary spiritual growth beyond this predicament. Distraction is now a very normal way of negotiating life.
Dana O’Driscoll: Another challenge that many of us trying to move into sacred action face is what I call the “free-range fantasy.” In the same way that many people of previous generations were lured into the “white picket fence” narrative in the United States, those interested in sustainable living are often lured into the free-range fantasy today. The narrative goes something like this: You and your perfect partner decide to quit your day jobs, purchase 30 acres in some remote area debt free, and build a fully off-grid homestead complete with solar panels, acres of abundant gardens, fields full of goats, happy free-range chickens, and two cute children covered in strawberry juice.
”What Feminism Means to Me” by @Annie Mueller is excellent:
I could do what I wanted, to a degree, and stay within the community, be part of the tribe. I just had to be okay with the most important parts of me being casually overlooked, ignored, or dismissed.
Chris Gilliard: These “smart” devices all fall under the umbrella of what the digital-studies scholar David Golumbia and I call “luxury surveillance”—that is, surveillance that people pay for and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits. These gadgets are analogous to the surveillance technologies deployed in Detroit and many other cities across the country in that they are best understood as mechanisms of control: They gather data, which are then used to affect behavior.
Graham Harvey: Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship to others. Dana Driscoll: Animism is a belief in the spirit of all things. Animistic views recognize that rivers, stones, trees, animals, human-created objects, and people all have spirits and that those spirits can be worked with, learned from, and honored in various ways.
Alan Jacobs: I think we’re looking at not one but two futures — a fork in the road for humans in Technopoly. … A few will get frustrated by the fakery, minimize their time on the internet, and move back towards the real. They’ll be buying codex books, learning to throw pots or grow flowers, and meeting one another in person. The greater number will gradually be absorbed into some kind of Metaverse in which they really see Joe Biden transformed into Dark Brandon or hear Q whisper sweet nothings into their ears.