Hei Johannes --
What interests me here is the posturing of power, and the decay implicit in myths of cultural heritage anyway, and what is "preservation" standing in for? What chasms?
Preservation, the archive as one form of that process, is only possible when there is excess energy available to maintain the 'material' order of whatever is being preserved. We in the developed world have lived through a time where energy excess (glut) has allowed wide-scale preservation of 'old' things. Historically, in times of less available energy, 'old' or non-essential things were 'allowed' to fall into disorder.
In times of great chaos -- times where energy flows are undirected, or there are many flows that are not unified, or are directed in many different 'directions' -- sees the act of preservation contract forced to contract to the scale of embodied presence alone. The primary focus of existence becomes: finding food, water, air, and defending the body from the chaos that threatens to enter it.
We are living in a time where there is no longer a lock on energy sources (that the 'West' has so long had), rising population brings greater competition, and with that, anger, fear, and 'decline' from the standards that we have enjoyed for one hundred years or so -- well, since forests, whale oil, coal, and, finally oil gave some humans an energy glut. Within glut we could save more, until now, we can save our entire 'lives' digitally (at the cost of CO2 generated from The Cloud). While around our glutted enclaves, chaos builds, and where we once projected order (via archaeology among the many colonial tools of projected power and 'order') we have no choice but to watch chaos creep back in: we are power-less to stop it. We no longer have the energy.
So it has been for Life on the planet all along, we are running under the same laws of nature as the last 3+ billion years or so.
There will be more evidences of this (perhaps the dis-order Amurikans are witnessing in their social system is a direct manifestation of the imbalance between too many people and too little energy compared to the high times of Empire in decades past -- implicit in "Make Amurika Great Again". Same with Europe. With chaos on the doorstep.
Saturday morning meditations. JH -- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite batholith twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
