In Need of Repair

How often do social machines break? Can couplings come loose, bearings break, hoses unhook, circuits cease to circulate? And if so, does the machine continue to exist? I need to sort out how much I am invested in the social machines to which I currently attach; to find out the conditions for making new decisions and directions in my life. I know that I am invested in certain things: school (in particular), interpersonal relationships, family ties, etc. I also know that these things are a result of other machines investing in me: my parents, my friends, debaters, other social machines which like me as a productive cog. Because of these interconnections which pivot and move through me, I feel a loss of agency over my means of existence. Even beyond this, I don’t feel comfortable approaching decisions outside of the framework of funding and consultation with my parents, and my use of a certain type of education (most prominent examples of a larger number of habitual tools for negotiating my world). In many ways I don’t feel (or encounter any substinative examples of) a sense of breakdown in these social machines. I’m finding it hard to make decisions outside the frameworks already established in my life by these social apparatuses.

Perhaps this has to do with my writing about time and prediction earlier. There is no reason to believe we have a future (or that we should know how to make sense of it if we do). However I continue to engage the world with certain presuppositions about my ability to move and access certain things in the world, and in many cases those presuppositions are actually necessary preconditions to doing something. Example: how should I get from Athens, Georgia to Olympia, Washington? The answer I have comes to buying access to some form of private transportation: plane, car, bus, etc… I presuppose I have access to those things, and I don’t really know how to get there without them. There are probably more examples. I feel that the way I express my desire to live as a satisfied and ethical human being is constrained by the habits in thinking I’ve picked up in life. That is why I think my (upcoming) decision on where to go to college matters so much, because I feel that it concerns the social tools I will have available, physically and mentally, as I go through later life. Do I exist as who I am only because I am a social machine who (in/out)puts only in particular forms? Or could I survive a breakdown in the various means by which I am attached to the world around me?

Duncan