QWERTY Christmas

QWERTY Christmas

0:00

/183.72266666666667

Civilization is a system.

A system designed to keep our species alive.

It works to make our lives easier, safer, more expansive, and more enjoyable - at least for some of us.

Like any large system, civilization is full of inefficiencies and unaccountable evils.

This happens because people build process for what they need today, but build it on the backs of what people needed yesterday - that's why I'm typing this on an expensive MacBook with a QWERTY keyboard layout that was designed to minimize key sticking in mechanical typewriters in 1874.

Alfred North Whitehead said,"Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them."

He meant that because I don't have to hunt for dinner, I can dedicate my time to writing, or that you can illuminate the night by flicking on a light switch.

But there's a dark side to that forgetting too.

We do stuff just because other people did it before us, even though the value has been stripped out.

And while we all owe a debt to our ancestors who harnessed fire, domesticated dogs, and first planted fields of grain, we have no allegiance to doing things the way that they did.

But most of us just follow the processes/rituals we're taught, and we usually don't update them until we're forced to.

So civilization is just hundreds of thousands of years of process improvements pushed on us by circumstance.

Is it removing or introducing something into the offices upstairs? Presumably from a mechanical room below. Is it introducing heat? IF so, sure hope there's some insulation inside that shit. If not, wtf is it? **Was it original or was it an adaptation to changing needs in the building?** Near Fulton St.

Long before we had electric lights and digital streaming, we needed entertainment and comfort to get us through the long nights.

We became rightly obsessed with the stars, and over thousands of years, began to detect patterns in their movements, using this information to speculate about where and what we were, but also to make practical decisions about when and where to take different actions across the solar year.

We knew about the stars long before we developed farming. We needed to know the seasons before we could master agriculture.

So... on a background layer, civilization is just a process improvement of our obsession with the stars.

And by the time Constantine allowed Christianity to be publicly practiced in the Roman Empire in 313 ce, the Romans and the Chinese and the Mesoamericans (probably) had already been celebrating the solstice for centuries.

The celebration of Christ's birth didn't arrive until more than 100 years later, when Christianity was steadily becoming the Roman empire's dominant religion. Christ's mass was simply overlayed on top of the existing solstice celebrations the Saturnalia and Sol Invictus, which of course were themselves overlays of older solstice festivals.

Make no mistake, we still practice a form of this ancient ritual, usually without thinking of how it served countless generations of our ancestors, who saw this time of year not just as the abstract closing of the old year and the arrival of the new, but also as the top of the climb, the worst of the winter hardships, when the days were shortest, and the light most narrow.

And they knew that from here the light would grow day by day.

But now that our blinking trees keep us warm, what reason do we have to look at the stars?

Cover Image: Captain Cook Hotel, Anchorage. 2015. The last time I went home for Christmas.