Header image: ﻼF Bellrope keyfob h/t Mikko Snellman
Le Guin, U.K. (2005). A Rant About “Technology”. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology
h/t James Gleick for the reference to the Le Guin piece
- Technology: how machines work V how minds, societies, and cultures work
- technology is how a society copes with physical reality
- Technology is the active human interface with the material world.
- But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.
We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology.” As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, shoes, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe…
- One way to illustrate that most technologies are, in fact, pretty “hi,” is to ask yourself of any manmade object, Do I know how to make one?
- I don’t know how to build and power a refrigerator, or program a computer, but I don’t know how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either. I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do.
One of my favourite articles from Low-tech Magazine
(June 2010) Lost Knowledge: Ropes and Knots
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/06/lost-knowledge-ropes-and-knots/
Rope as hardware; knots as software; ropework as one of our earliest forms of coding.
Archive: https://archive.is/HJDul