One of the most important patterns in third places is that the third place must define and delimit the zone of the activity that is the purported purpose of that space. There must be a place to serve drinks / lift weights / browse books as well as a space to *not* do those things.
Activity can be constituted in such a way that it anticipates its reception, and a functional space can be constituted in such a way that it organizes the space to receive that function.
The medicine man sees through you. Your conscious experience of your attention, judgments, desires is false, and only the medicine man's judgment of you is true. Your behavior is false, and only the medicine man's choices for your behavior are true. In your most deliberate, driven moments you are most lost.
You are an abandoned puppet in need of a puppeteer, and although you are incapable of choosing one for yourself (you poor puppet), the medicine man will graciously puppet you.
Paper was invented roughly around the year 100 in the Common Era.
By the year 800 (700 years later), Harun al-Rashid was leveraging the import of the Chinese technology of paper to Baghdad. By the year 1440 (640 years later) Gutenberg was using it.
Now in the year 2023 (583 years later) I have an e-ink display that imitates its functions, its dynamic responsiveness to ink, its folio format, etc.
"A trace of the true self exists in the false self," as the meme says.
This shit is better than the Tarot. Ask it a question, burn a click, then click three times to get your answer.
Reminder that when you click on <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Random/File> like 3-4 times you are creating a sequence out of otherwise unrelated symbols -- a sequence that probably has probably never been linked before, has never before had a way to become linked, and a sequence that will probably never come around again for anyone else unless you either communicate it or otherwise if things get very zesty in the future of informational technology.
The medicine man will fix it. The medicine man will make it all better. The medicine man can see who you really are inside. The medicine man can judge what true fairness is. The medicine man can arrive at complete conclusions from incomplete information. The medicine man can utter the holy words that turn calves into cows and grey into silver.
Everyone should listen to the medicine man. Listening to the medicine man makes you a good person, and not listening makes you a bad person.
What I'm saying is that continental political philosophers are the try-hard salutatorians and American liberals are the drunk jocks who have capriciously torn global history from millennia of imperialist philosophy.
The American liberal, who has recently come back from a brutal campaign destroying the government that had been understood as the most powerful in the world, wrote a new definition of universal human rights on the back of a cocktail napkin and in the same evening proceeded to hire a prostitute in a racist manner (???) and passed out from a bunch of old-timey drugs.
Humanist interested in the consequences of the machine on intellectual history.