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Natural Alienation

I am sitting at a table in a dining room, writing this gemlog. My toes touching the hardwood floor. A window sits right next to me, but the light inside causes it to reflect my own face instead of letting me see the dark sky beyond. It is not quite time to sleep, but it would be dark if my environment was not illuminated by the incandescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

I went outside thrice today. I fed the cats, pulled some books out of storage, and fed the cats again. I also walked in circles for some exercise. What am I doing?

A person alienated from nature is alienated from and destroying his or herself. No system has shown this connection more clearly than capitalist modernity; environmental destruction and ecological crises go hand in hand with the oppression and exploitation of people.

Here I am, typing on a laptop plugged in to the local power grid, dependent on fossil fuel extraction merely to communicate with you, dear reader. My main method of communication with others depends on harnessing the power of lightning and sending it through carefully arranged sand. Think about that, we got sand to do math by running a stream of lightning through it, and now many of us are dependent on it to communicate.

Technology is not bad, at least as far as I am informed, but it does reshape the way we interact with the world. Is this for better, or worse?

~ Josias, 2022-10-05