The article's counterpoint, well expressed (another Time's comment):
I quite often have the opposite feeling as to where this is all leading, that instead of it all freeing me into a good thing larger than myself, it's trapping me in a labyrinth I find difficult to escape. It makes me think of the following passage I once read in a paper by Andrea Battistini:
'In this process of extreme professionalization and specialization, the philosophers of today are very similar to the Minotaur, the custodian of the labyrinth, an edifice that seems to be the fruit of the “barbarism of reflection.” In constructing the labyrinth, Daedalus used reason not to favor the meetings among men but to impede them by creating separate spaces, completely dark and deprived of points of intersection. In the form of the labyrinth, with its angles and curves, closed rooms and blind alleys, a global vision becomes blurred, replacing the idea of totality with the sense of disorientation. As Plutarch writes in telling the myth of Theseus, the labyrinth was “an ordinary prison, having no other bad quality but that it secured the prisoners from escaping” (Theseus, 16). Those who were locked up inside wandered “in the labyrinth, and finding no possible means of getting out, they miserably ended their lives there” (15). To save the prisoners Theseus intervenes, arriving on the spot after a long journey because the labyrinth is also very far from human civilization. Ariadne’s help to Theseus is fundamental—she furnishes the hero the thread, which could be the metaphor of the path, the journey, a memory of history, a story, a plot building itself bit by bit, or a path paved with experience and observation.'
I love using technology to make things, but find it all too easy to lose myself in it too, losing a felt dimension of life, taking me from a felt "3D" experience to a "2D" experience instead, one lacking a certain perceived sense of meaningful depth, flattening it out. I've written before of the gordian knot, and how it proved impossible to untie solely by internal manipulation, that a sword, something completely outside the system, had to be employed to slice it open. The labyrinth of myth is much like that knot. Theseus couldn't escape without Ariadne's help, by means solely of his own devising. Sometimes I have to admit I feel so caught up in our technological web I really do feel I need some Ariadne to help me find my way out. --Scott Inglett Rochester, MN
'In this process of extreme professionalization and specialization, the philosophers of today are very similar to the Minotaur, the custodian of the labyrinth, an edifice that seems to be the fruit of the “barbarism of reflection.” In constructing the labyrinth, Daedalus used reason not to favor the meetings among men but to impede them by creating separate spaces, completely dark and deprived of points of intersection. In the form of the labyrinth, with its angles and curves, closed rooms and blind alleys, a global vision becomes blurred, replacing the idea of totality with the sense of disorientation. As Plutarch writes in telling the myth of Theseus, the labyrinth was “an ordinary prison, having no other bad quality but that it secured the prisoners from escaping” (Theseus, 16). Those who were locked up inside wandered “in the labyrinth, and finding no possible means of getting out, they miserably ended their lives there” (15). To save the prisoners Theseus intervenes, arriving on the spot after a long journey because the labyrinth is also very far from human civilization. Ariadne’s help to Theseus is fundamental—she furnishes the hero the thread, which could be the metaphor of the path, the journey, a memory of history, a story, a plot building itself bit by bit, or a path paved with experience and observation.'
I love using technology to make things, but find it all too easy to lose myself in it too, losing a felt dimension of life, taking me from a felt "3D" experience to a "2D" experience instead, one lacking a certain perceived sense of meaningful depth, flattening it out. I've written before of the gordian knot, and how it proved impossible to untie solely by internal manipulation, that a sword, something completely outside the system, had to be employed to slice it open. The labyrinth of myth is much like that knot. Theseus couldn't escape without Ariadne's help, by means solely of his own devising. Sometimes I have to admit I feel so caught up in our technological web I really do feel I need some Ariadne to help me find my way out. --Scott Inglett Rochester, MN
Suffice to say, I'll be reading this book when it comes out.
All of this reminds me of this book, though I have not read it.
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