Some first musings on something I really
need to clarify... if only for myself.
Here at home we'll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There'll be spandex jackets one for everyone"
-Donald Fagen
I worked the summer of 1982 as a courier. Soon to
begin my sophomore year in high school, I was paid
to ride the subways of Manhattan lugging tools,
software, and hardware to installs. The company I
worked for leased and sold Jacquard mini
computers. In hind-sight they were in their death
throws. The IBM 5150 had ripped the industry a new
one only the year before.
That summer found me on a Chinese philosophy binge
and the book most likely to be found in my pocket
as I headed uptown was Laozi's Tao Te Ching.
The Daoist themes of naturalness, spontaneity,
simplicity, detachment from desires, ziran, and wu
wei carved new channels through the thought of a
Catholic boy from Queens.
At the time, Donald Fagen's I.G.Y. and his
follow-up New Frontier were important to me. The
world of Star Trek, after all, was the inescapable
future and that future would be composed of equal
parts compassion and chromium. What a wanker.
Somewhere between now and then, those songs rotted
and their stench of irony makes me wretch. They
might as well be solerpunk anthems for all of it.
Don't misconstrue. I don't stand in opposition
to solerpunk - I'm too easy going for that - but I
do feel that it's predicated on the Myth of
Progress. That's the same fallacy that underpins
Capitalism.
It was my time on Mastodon [of which I will say no
more] that makes me queesy. Maybe it was a gross
misrepresentation of solarpunk by it's proponents
at the time, but invariably any problem-solving
discussion reduced itself to selecting the best
product of Industry to solve the given issue.
Reflecting on this for many months now has brought
me to a seed of a thought.
I've never been one to embrace a doctrine that is
underpinned by opposition - for example, I'm a
Humanist and not an atheist. I prefer Libertarian
Socialist to Anarchist but in the US, the right
has co-opted the Libertarian name. Obviously I
wasn't going to call my idea DarkPunk (which
sounds like a Goth thing anyway) and I really have
little in common with the Primitivists.
Only this morning did I realize the good fit
Taoism makes with my position and I must settle my
thoughts in text soon...
