... I look around in this hall full
of dust and rust, and I consider:
railways and shorthand — both were
keys for my personal development and for
all development which I helped to take
into the wilderness. The results of
thinking and acting were determined by
abilities of brain and hand, in other
words by the ability of human beings to
understand and — with a bit of
training — to emulate.
Who wanted it, could become knowledgable
from reliable documentation of the spoken
word — and was empowered to track
down the shortness‘s of liars.
Or he could understand the working of
steam in a locomotive and he could make
use of that principle to make his own
wheels turn — in a tractor for work
in a sugarcane-field, in a pump to clear
waste-water from the mines, for a mill or
for a forge. All of these were machines
whose functions did remain
comprehensible; they could be maintained
by hand, may be by using a suitable
hand-tool. Each part could be replaced by
hand or could be improved by brain and by
hand.
Less and less people are quite at home
with the matrix of electric-powered
machines.
More and more people feel compelled to
use them without comprehending how they
work. Electricity did not only snatch the
power from the wheel but, at the same
time, took away the personal freedom to
copy and to pursue with own means.
Tracks of digital ciphers on flickering
monitors do lead into a fictitious world
manipulated by specialised handymen of
ageless profiteers of conflicts in the
real world. …
Click!
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