Scythes and Computers

24. New technology confirms and extends an idea of the world. The scythe allowed man to cut grass while comfortably standing so that more grass could be cut, more land could be brought under his control as a farmer. The subsequent innovations of the threshing machine, the mechanical reaper, the bailer and the combine harvester further demonstrated to man that there can be no alternative idea of the earth. Each new technology gives renewed confirmation to the rightness of agriculture.

 

28. The computer extends man´s infatuation with the television screen, allowing him to enter it and live inside it. No longer an observer, man becomes a participant. He now lives and plays among the flickering shadows on the cave wall.

29. The shadows are without smell or sound or touch. It is a worldview that privileges the visual. It begins in literacy and Plato´s forms and extends through Gutenberg´s mass production of text. The seated reader and observer has access to a truth beyond time. That he can now play in the computerized shadows becomes the truth of the world.

41. Progress: the periodic appearance of more efficient technologies that demonstrates the rightness of an idea. What he calls progress is the certainty of his worldview. With enough progress there can be no other ideas about the world.

77. The hawks that soar above the city, the tall old growth trees along the calles, that is all that interests me about Botogá.