Barn sale was mostly a bust - got a SCM Corsair Deluxe of late 70s manufacture (I think) in its original box, which is pretty neat, but it takes proprietary ribbons and it's not exactly the best machine. In fact, it's actually pretty shitty. Weak strikes abound - but it's light, and it's small... though it's in no place to displace my Royal or Olympia ultraportables. Can't argue with $5, though. If anything, it's an interesting display piece.

So, a while ago I was really into postmodernism, and I recall one person saying that humans, for all intents and purposes, are cyborgs. Fair enough - many of our vital functions are carried out or otherwise enhanced by machines. Modern society wouldn't work without the integrated circuit.

So, I moved on from postmodernism and the idea basically went dormant until I started reading egalitarian biocentricism the other day, which I think is a crock of shit, but I mounted a counter-argument that stated that, since typewriters and other machines have "interests", in that certain actions enhance their intended function, while other actions could be considered "pains" for the machines - like if I were to jump on one of my typewriters. That would frustrate its desires in that it would impair its ability to function.

So, I presented this in order to torpedo the argument, which I managed to do pretty well, but then that old idea struck me: maybe it's not all bad to be considerate of our machines? At least, we should be mindful of them. Like how language determines the parameters in which we can think, our machines determine how we perceive the world. In essence, the printing press and the television, the radio and the automobile, affect tremendously the nature and amount of information that we ever take in, in the first place. All these machines form a sort of exoskeleton around us, you could say. The human experience of the 21st Century is fundamentally different from the human experience of the 19th Century because of the extension of our senses provided by the new machines of the Industrial Revolution, and so on and so forth.

So, FFS, Marshall McLuhan was right!

From that, I suppose you could extrapolate that changing the machines we interact with thus changes what kind of ideas propagate within us.