A Partner In Negotiation
Mid September and Fall is approaching. I anticipate a last visit to the drag strip for the Saturday coming up. Drag racing is a quintessential male, warm weather sport. Race cars constructed to achieve maximum acceleration are an icon of a passing era. I confess my love of the adrenaline stimulating sight and sound of everything about a drag strip: the effort to meld a knowledge of physics, the discipline of self-control, the ineffable adaptability required of team work whether by family or by trusted friends – to prepare a race car and get it to the starting line…
It is said that the point of experience is the journey, not the destination. Generally speaking the maxim seems to hold true. The demands of the journey are often rich with discovery, in retrospect more so than the anticipated terminus. I have found this to be true in conversation with race car owners, and crew members…
However the post WWII late industrial age of the internal combustion engine is rapidly passing. Are we not in the vestibule of the age of renewable energy, and of the electric vehicle? And so it goes.
This from a fascinating book by philosopher Byung-chul Han, Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld:
The informatization of the world
turns things into informatons, that is,
into information processing actors.
The car of the future
will no longer be a thing
that is associated with fantasies of power and possession,
but a mobile ‘center for the distribution of information’,
that is,
an informaton that communicates with us:
‘The car speaks to you, informs you,
“spontaneously” about its general condition
-and about yours
(it may refuse to function if you do not function well).
It gives advice and takes decisions.
It is a partner
in the comprehensive negotiation
over how to live.
-excerpt Das Andere selbst: Habilitation, Vienna: edition Passagen, by Jean Baudrilliard, 1994, p. 11,
