It's Saturday morning, yellow light on green leaves. Morning NY TImes and coffee. Sigh. Trying again to make sense of the patchwork that is the news. The differences that lead us to our informed actions: between truth and meaning, between science and technology, between technology and sufficient care, between energy source and energy need, between belief and validation.
We have so much technology, and so many people. If we'd been through this life before we'd know how to use it correctly, but we don't have that knowledge (apparently that data doesn't transfer...). So we need to spend more time imagining the worst. Then, once we imagine these hells, we need to spend the money and time for both prevention and rescue.
The forethought before starting unnecessary wars. Before drilling a mile undersea. Before creating specialist systems for redirecting billions of dollars from the many to the one. Before moving the carbon from underground into the atmosphere.
The bigger the technology, the bigger the bang. Only the specialist technologists are near enough to the action to know or at least study how to build in the protection before the unintended fuse is lit. If they did this without the government, we wouldn't need a government to protect the rest of us from the unimagined hells technology unleashes.
But how many times do we have to see it: the technologists don't do it, they are too specialized and focused on the drill bit, and not on the asymmetrical accident.
And the businessmen funneling money into the technology company don't do it, because the money spent in prevention reduces the profits, and the time spent in prevention means that someone else might get there first.
And so we are left with the government, whose trigger is the cataclysmic event. Without the government, there would be no prevention at all, only scars, the memory theaters of our surprise.
Foucault: "But if you ask me, does this new technology of power take its historical origin from an identifiable individual or group of individuals who decide to implement it so as to further their interest, or facilitate their utilization of the social body, then I would say no. These tactics were invented and organized from the starting points of local conditions and particular needs. They took place in piecemeal fashion prior to any class strategy designed to weld them into vast coherent ensembles".
No gods in heaven, just this deep night.
Waves meet the island, or miss it.
Seasons strike the land, or kiss it.
Blind planets spinning in darkness and light.
-rbe
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