It’s difficult to describe the joy of being tired from working with your hands—work focused on the object at hand. Sculptors, nurses, gardeners, programmers—in the long hours, all the pollutants freeze away in the snowflake clarity of direct action. The crisp, meditative air of means and ends fused—a deep breath at last.
What calm technology could match this, we wondered, before we realized that technology is this feeling: the diamond adequacy of material knowledge well learned and implemented. Without obfuscation, misdirection, or cynical collusion.
It came into our minds—by some synchronicity, or else underground maneuvers of the cult of the object-at-hand—to build a single artifice adequate to our weird, material joy, to protect and elaborate it. A bold enterprise. What could absorb our work in its fused clarity? What castle of means and ends could retain the infinite redundancy of our projects, within which each suspended completion is a source of glaring satisfaction? Amidst global strife, what apparatus could contain our naive optimism, ever contented by our labors—like an army of tired puppies? A technology… of anticapture? No, a friend interjected, with a vaguely stoned mischief—half smirk-emoji, half Always Sunny—much more powerful than that: A technology of joy.
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