I grew up in the country where cars were invented. The roads and cars here seem safe; in any case, everything is done to make them safe. The accident is anticipated, the risk calculated, possible collisions computed, and the damage minimized through modular construction, so we are told. We want to be prepared for everything, here.
It is this logic of securing, calculating risk, and prevention that makes me want to leave this country again. There is no room for the unexpected; it is staged only in high culture. Yet it would be much simpler to open oneself to the incalculable. To give improvisation room, to let the unforeseeable and unseen be. Certainly experience teaches us. We learn from accidents to build so that next time it is less bad, and if we do not, lawyers are waiting to sue: I get into a technically highly complex device, and if something happens, I first ask the designer whether he or she could not have known it beforehand, and who is to blame now.
Surely machines are there to make work easier or extend our senses. But here they are embedded in the social, and discussed in those terms too. Technology and its interaction dominate the discourse.
It is refreshing to see that in many parts of the world, technology is simply technology. It is accepted in its imperfection. Sometimes, with a smile, this is disparaged as fate.
– make do –
Leave a Reply