Tuesday, May 11, 2010

A Reliquary Of Anti-Industrialist Antipathy

My blog has fast become the world's reliquary of anti-industrialist antipathy.

I'm hosting it, archiving it, watching it stream in from its broad spectrum in the world and zero down to the vanishing point of a single light (or sometimes, a dark spot.)

We're trying to keep it virtual, because there's no room for storing big relics. Like if we find a tree limb down at the edge of an industrial section somewhere, the result of industrial sprawling blight, we will be content to have a digital photo of it. The tree limb itself, it probably should go without saying, would be too much for us to handle. Not one tree limb, especially, but one implies there could be more than one. Even a printed photo takes up room, filing space, however valuable it might be for study involving a magnifying glass. Digital photos take a little room, but you can get quite a few on a hard drive.

The same principles are going to be true for the other relics of industrial blight. We can't bring in a speeding truck and put it in the reliquary. That's going to need to be digitized somehow, so thank you for understanding.

The other thing -- beyond the relics of industrialism per se -- is what we are able to produce by way of study, making proclamations, speeches, slide shows, news articles, and blog posts, expressive of our concerted antipathy toward industrialism and the industrial powers. A lot of this starts out digitally. We could then print it out and scan it, making it digital again in a circular process. But why we would want to do that would be anyone's guess.

Please, anything you contribute to the reliquary, keep it digital, or as small as possible. If you can't produce a digital likeness of the object, something small with a description will be accepted. Perhaps the pointed tip of a leaf, just as an example, in the case of a downed tree. Or a single blade of grass if you find grass sucked down into the mud and wish to document it.

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