The query "Chicago is the capital of" turns up some interesting answers:
- segregation
- Black America
- improv comedy
- unfettered aspiration
- cool
- the midwestern United States
- the Polish diaspora
I'll believe that US Americans are ready for communal lifestyles when they start making love love love songs about family bonds rather than individual romances.
Nothing is more depressing than talking to US Americans about what they imagine a return to communal life would look like. Lots of Type 1 fun and ego-syntonic ideas, IE "everybody will do things with me that aesthetically please me."
Like... go talk to people who live in actually communal societies. It's very often Type 2 and ego-dystonic, like "shuffle around in the cold rain while you and your cousin do X because your uncle says so," or "host a distant relative in your home for a long time."
Just once I'd like to see a good dramatization of Nixon. Nixon was terrorized by his father, who beat him and abused him as a child. The anxiety consumed Nixon. It became impossible for him to ever rest comfortably under any authority for the rest of his life. He felt he *had to* maneuver constantly just to escape further abuse. Thus the most terrifying moment of his life was the Checkers Speech, when he was rejected by his father AND nearly rejected by the leader of the free world.
@futurebird @davidho One of the obsessions in the back of my head for the past few years: An ebike tow-able solar camper/micro-house boat with a minimal trailer assembly that packs onboard along with the bike.
I think it's possible. I built a *road-bike* towable bike camper some years ago and lived out of it entirely for more than half a year.
And yes, your husband would be happy that the bike was often stored inside the trailer. One day I'll build the amphibious version.
The upshot of this is that web / phone addiction is worse, or at least a bigger psi-risk, than we naively recognize.
Phones are uniquely embedded in the life-world and uniquely dynamic in a way that mass media never were.
Minds think in signs. There's no Adamic psyche who has a complete life of mind that's subsequently contaminated with memes or whatever. Thinking is a sign-process. Always has been.
And likewise, we can't read media technologies as if they're just more tools. The printing press is unlike the spinning wheel. The spinning wheel weaves wool. The printing press weaves dialectics.
Humanist interested in the consequences of the machine on intellectual history.