My Technology and Ecology in Literature class today worked with selections from Charles Darwin, Samuel Butler, and Richard Dawkins. They did a fantastic job exploring Darwin's metaphors and Butler's eerie proto-The Matrix. A highlight moment was talking these things through with them and then realizing we had a sort of machine consciousness, at least of the variety Butler is talking about (i.e. a governor) right there on the wall, right there inside the room, a conscious machine is calling us and it's right here inside the room with us!
Tonight, I picked up The Foundation Pit by Platonov for a little dinner-time reading, and felt compelled to post the following passage:
"Voshchev, just as before, did not feel the truth of life, but exhaustion from the heavy ground resigned him to humility--and he simply collected, on rest days, all kinds of petty and unfortunate scraps of nature, as documentary proof of the planless creation of the world, as the facts of the melancholy of each living breath."
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