@daylen. Okay, I'm willing to play the game implicit in the exercise, but I also don't want that to the bury the central thrust of the piece, which was about context-shifting and how it is the source of the key tricks to holding attention past points that are healthy or desirable.
And on that level, I would draw the parallel to free and open source software. I know you are not only a Linux user but use Arch, which is a community very much characterized by user-control and suspicion to the corporate involvement in, say Ubuntu. So I would say any reason why Arch is to be preferred to Microsoft Windows serves as template for why people would choose to DIY direct experience rather than have it mediated through corporations.
If this thread was on the wider internet, you could almost promise someone would swoop in with some bit about FOSS just being about cheapskates not wanting to (or not able) to pay. But that really shouldn't play here on a frugality forum. And, being shamed by shitheads aside, the money savings is a valid argument.
Reality isn't being mediated -- at least with expensive "production values" -- for free.
Now to your comments.
daylen wrote: ↑Tue Mar 12, 2024 11:43 am
Say your agenda is to disconnect technology from nature because you believe that technology has no inherit beauty. Not saying this is where you are coming from but rather that this is a plausible view.
Indeed, I do
not believe this is where I am going from. I would hope I had absorbed Pirsig enough to not be in that spot -- I sure quote him enough, as I will again now:
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself.
I will note that the book was also strongly anti-television. So even accepting the possibility of seeing harmonies most holy in any technology does not imply an acceptance of any way it will be used.
Going at it from the other direction is Michael Pollan's book Second Nature. I would describe the book as a cultural anthropology of gardening specifically, but our relationship to nature in general. Pollan shows how difficult it is for Americans to escape either treating nature as a virgin that must not be touched or the dark savagery to be lashed out against. The virginal view is in assent, and while more pleasant, it creates impediments to good management of wildlife.
Another book I have read that undermines this virginal view is Inheritors of the Earth by Chris D. Thomas. For example, the majority of species in an area did not evolve in that area, meaning humans humans no rubric to just down areas as say "no new species."
So, I don't think humans should reject technology for some opposite, concept "Nature." But again, if I have to play for a side...
daylen wrote: ↑Tue Mar 12, 2024 11:43 am
Wouldn't this view cut you off from what could otherwise be a beautiful relationship between nature and technology?
But the relationship between the two isn't beautiful now and hasn't been for a while. And nature is not the one unbalancing the relationship and/or distorting it to ugliness.
We are left with tech being the abuser giving us a "baby, I can change." And just like the abuse cycle, even if there is a momentary change, you have to watch out for backsliding.
I choose my words pretty carefully when I wrote " But what technology
without cultural change can not stimulate and what the vast, vast majority does not get enough of, is one: connection and two: beauty
without agenda."
Best case on any tool is paying one time in a competitive market from a seller with a culture of providing quality. None of these are the current trends in business. This isn't even a trilemma when you're dealing with Big Tech; you're lucky when you find one.
==
Well, that straw man turned out to be a
chair pull. I truly have better things to do with my time than that.