Unfolding

The neighbourhood kids are out flying with their new Christmas drone. Seeing it hovering above the snow pile made me feel like living in a sci-fi movie. When my mother was here the other week, I asked her how incomprehensible, if at all, our home would seem to someone in the 1940s. The microwave oven is after all just another oven, the induction stove just another stove and the first mechanical dishwasher was invented already in the 1850s.

I know it may sound shallow, but one thing I really appreciate with getting older is to simply be along for the ride, to see how the future unfolds, how the inherent contradictions of being human are played out in new technological contexts. Sometimes, this means disconnecting:

More seriously, the defining technological change of our time has to do with the domestication of the global. To be on the cusp of a time when we finally have to grow up and stop running away from our common humanity. The Trumps of this world are really the last desperate attempt to defend old hierarchies and patterns of domination when we should instead have the courage to turn outward and have confidence in the power of our example.