“The human essence is freedom from the will of others, and freedom is a function of possession.” C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p.3.

I find myself still somewhere deep in the “uncanny valley,” staring at “uncanny,” too human-like dystopian objects, struggling to get out of the YouTubian reality of weirdness. Perhaps reading, remember reading? might transport me back to a more comforting pre-digital, pre-cyberculture reality, when turning the page brought pleasure, adventure and history. Instead of being mesmerized by a visually over-stimulating and perpetually distracting screen full of choices taking me aimlessly down ever more time-wasting paths, maybe some academic reading would provide a temporary cure.

Instead, Johnathan Sterne in “Historiography of Cyberculture” enjoins his reader to engage in an “epistemic break” … “if scholars do not make an ‘epsitemic break’ with the existing ways of defining a problem, they risk importing unwanted and unexamined institutional and personal biases into their work.” (Sterne, p. 24).

I must begin to define my object of study and choose the method with which to approach it. “Our job is to invent and not to repeat.”
(Sterne, p. 25)