Objects
“When you turn on a TV set and immerse yourself in images of human beings doing human activities - looking for unusually small houses, awaiting elimination on a reality show, solving murders in a procedural - it’s easy to forget that what you’re watching is not people but a machine, its network of pixels, subpixels, liquid crystals and transistors working silently in the background, allowing us to dwell in a bustling kingdom of our own design.
Against the swift exactitude and raw power of machinery, the human anatomy - with its soft, squishy shapes and nerve-riddled interior - looks vulnerable at best. No wonder, then, that it is given only the smallest tasks: brushing sawdust from a screw, checking a gauge, holding a brace in place for the machine that is doing the real work.
By the end of the marathon, you might find yourself thinking that humans are the real problem with the manufacturing process. They’re slow, they’re inefficient, they’re fragile, and they put their products to poor use: A plastic bag is a neutral object until it’s discarded in an estuary.”
- NYTimes
Originally published at oxalic. You can comment here or there.