Everything is Up for Discussion
Triggering Agency
This is the second of four “interventions” for changing the register from digital industrialism to something, well, better. The idea of changing the register is introduced here, and the first intervention, “denaturalize power” is here.
The first time I used a word processing program was in the computer lab at college. When I was ready to save my file, the grad student supervising the lab asked me how I wanted to save my file: as a “protected” file that no one else could open, a “read only” file that other people could open, or a “read-write” file that people could not only open but also change. I went with read-write, of course.
I’ll never forget how that concept stayed with me as I left the lab and considered the other media and institutions in my world. Which things were read-only, and which were read-write? And why?
Why is money read-only? Or religion? What if we could change them? How much of the world was arbitrarily protected from our intervention, who got to make those decisions, and what happens if we violate them? I had been raised in the read-only media environment of television, and learned to be a spectator. Might the read-write possibilities of the digital environment grant me greater access to the dashboard of civilization?
