As they say the things you expect them to say, all the modern conveniences, you think whether or not they’re actually conveniences or even modern. They’re convenient for you, now, and they’re apparently modern, but how much good will they do you elsewhere? Taking apart an automobile and rebuilding it so that you need to hold down thirty-seven buttons simultaneously in order to make a right turn may in fact give you more control in a particular situation, but overall isn’t it less control? And more inconvenient? Yet that’s what we’re up against, really.
Common tasks have steps added to them, they have additional requirements thrust upon them: they are made more complicated in order to bring added simplicity. Dig?
The most basic of tasks are turned into twelve-ring circuses. The tedium and uncertainty of catching/harvesting and preparing food is replaced with dissociation from the source and dislocation from the food itself. Because what can you know about a pack of crackers? What is partially hydrogenated soybean oil, anyway?
Convenience foods, stores, flags, etc. etc.
Convenient when and for whom and for how long? Where does the convenience come from and, most importantly, is it transferable? Yes in a general sense, but only to a limited extent. And because most convenience is created by transferring the burden of knowledge from the user to the creator of the convenience itself, the user finds herself most limited in her ability to replicate the convenience, should she find herself without and in a strange place. Unless said strange place is also equipped with said conveniences.
Is an invention that renders you partially (if not totally) helpless in its absence really so modern?
So you find yourself inconvenienced, and of course you can’t be expected to have infinite knowledge or to be capable of recreating your position of convenience, not absolutely, but will you be able to eat and sleep, might you somehow find shelter and water?
That convenience means that you don’t have to worry now. But worries don’t just disappear. They just get postponed and transmuted.
More later.