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30 | STEAMPUNKING OUR FUTURE: AN EMBEDDED HISTORIAN’S NOTEBOOK
“There is an element of that in the way that we approach our technology too,”
I observed. “I know that my iPhone is going to be landfill someday. I absolutely
know that. I know that the amount of power I consume when I gun up my Xbox
and I turn on my HDTV and all that sort of shit, that I am helping in the destruction
of the earth and yet I’m not going to part with my iPhone. I fucking love it, it’s
a great toy.”
“Yeah, and why should you? And why would we deny anyone else the same
thing?”
“There’s an element of paradox in so much of what we do,” I mused.
“Yeah, totally. I like to acknowledge that.” It’s eerie—this guy is like my more
talented (and more bearded) doppelganger or something. We just keep nodding
and saying “yeah, yeah.”
Historian’s Note
I’m working off a transcript here. For good or ill, the expletives that ap-
pear in this book are not gratuitous. I’d rather leave them in than censor
them out of some arbitrary sense of propriety. That goes double here where
we’re talking about human beings and our baser emotions. Plus, some
things are actually better (though perhaps less tastefully) described with
a drink or two under one’s belt and an, er… let’s say “healthily-diverse”
vocabulary.
“In any fiction I tell,” Greg continued, “I am going to acknowledge that humans
are complex. They’re paradoxical. I think ultimately fairytales are the most
popular tales because people want there to be a right side and a wrong side. I don’t
know if you felt the same but I felt taken along for the ride with Avatar but also
kind of violated by it because I knew before hand what that story was going to be.”
“Well there was a naiveté at the ending. It was like okay, yeah, I get it and I
want Gaia to win and I want harmony, but I also know that in practice nothing is
that simple. Granted, I felt very differently when I was, say 23. Then it was black
and white.”
“Yeah, yeah, totally.” Greg nodded in agreement.
We continued drinking and talking, oblivious to the fact that the restaurant was
emptying out around us.