Somehow, self-realization and freedom always entail buying something new, never conserving something old.
The problem of technology is almost the opposite of how it is usually posed: the problem is not “instrumental rationality,” it is rather that we have come to live in a world that precisely does not elicit our instrumentality, the embodied kind that is original to us. We have too few occasions to do anything, because of a certain predetermination of things from afar.
Maybe we can say, after all, that higher education is indispensable to prepare students for the jobs of the information economy. Not for the usual reason given, namely, that there is ever-increasing demand for workers with more powerful minds, but in this perverse sense: college habituates young people to accept as the normal course of things a mismatch between form and content, official representations and reality. This cannot be called cynicism if it is indispensable to survival in the contemporary office, as it was in the old Soviet Union.
Currently reading: The World-Ending Fire by Wendell Berry 📚
Currently reading: Exclusion & Embrace by Miroslav Volf 📚
