“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, July 21, 2014

When The Onion Agrees with You

...you know you're on to something

Look how it phrases things: 

“Even if every person decided to sit down at the exact same time, there would still be an adequate number of chairs to go around,” Clouse added. “As far as chairs go, we’re basically set.”

That's my line! Take a look at this. Marina Zurkow's new thing. I had to do the entry on plexiglass chairs! 

In case you haven't been following this, I'm a bit obsessed with chairs as they are a good way of thinking about how nonhuman nonsentient things have agency. A human is now a chair vector. After we go extinct there will be huge piles of chairs on whatever planets we have colonized. The first thing you design in Design 101 is...a chair. 

Making a chair comes from the age of agrilogistics. The conquering king sitting on his enemies etc. Then everyone had to have one: democracy! But they are no good for you. In effect they are literally a virus: an idea-virus and a chair-virus, and we seem hopelessly incapable to stop reproducing them. 

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