The Great Sabotage Issue 2: The Pickax and the Cathedral
Against the Exiters: on anemoia, machines, and the only resistance that holds.
My apologies for missing last Thursday—the third Thursday—to post The Great Sabotage. I had it ready, then pitched it. This is what it has become. Enjoy.
There is a word I came across recently that has stayed with me. Anemoia. John Koenig coined it in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. This is a wonderful little book that does the rare and beautiful thing of giving language to emotions we already carry but don’t know how to put into words. He defines anemoia as a pang of nostalgia for an era you never lived through.
The writer Freya India, who covers girlhood and Gen Z culture for Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel Substack, applied it to something she’d noticed among her generation: a grief for a world they have only ever seen from the outside. She pointed to a YouTube video. It’s a home video of the last day of school at a San Diego high school in the 1990s, captioned “Phones? No. We had each other.” It’s garnered close to thirty thousand comments, many of them from people in their twenties, longing for a world that was already gone before they were old enough to enter it.
One commenter wrote: “The whole concept of a real childhood is completely out the window at this point in time, and that’s extremely sad to me.”
I watched the video and got goosebumps. Then I felt grief. But different in kind from Freya India’s generation. Because I was there. I lived it—a “Last Analogue.” That’s the term I give to our generation, GenX, the last generation to have experienced childhood, our teens, and even early twenties before we had phones in our hands.
When Living was the Old Posting
I grew up in an era where “posting” was called “living.”
I submit this story as Exhibit A:
A buddy and I put a La-Z-Boy chair in the back of his pickup and drove around our small town filming it. We ordered food at the McDonald’s drive-thru. We staged a get-pulled-over-by-a-cop scene with an actual cop who laughed and played along. I have the VHS somewhere, I think.
After every home football game (well, maybe not “every”), we’d go toilet-paper houses. We once used ninety-two rolls on a single house.
Sometimes, we’d get a group together and drive up to Pumping Station Road at the entrance to the state game lands and hike back to “The Rock” — a small ridge with boulder outcroppings. We’d build a massive bonfire and just talk or gallivant in the dark under the moonlight, or hike down to Hammer Creek and jump over the falls with makeshift torches planted in the creek bank.
When I tell my daughters these stories, they laugh and dream of doing the truck-lazy-boy-thing. Then one of them says that they’d be arrested for even trying that today.
And now, Exhibit B:
I toured the country in my twenties before smartphones existed. And, don’t fall over, but we used … wait for it … a map to navigate.
Long live Rand McNally.
When I finally got a little flip phone for the band, we had to be vigilant because we had to pay for each individual text message.
Texting was an event, not a reflex.
But I remember thinking, “Someday, this will be how we communicate.” Now it’s ubiquitous with language itself, morphing an entire generation’s capacity to speak, write, and think from poetic-human to machine-rot.
One summer night, after a tour to New England, we drove to ole Pumping Station Road with bamboo tiki torches and spent hours launching into the dark, shallow water over the falls. I don’t have a digital photo of it. And I can’t show you the text thread of our plans. But it happened. My own real-life secret memory, hidden from the algorithm forever.
Don’t poets write about those times? Driving New England roads in the fall. Rendezvous in the mountain dark. “The View Between Villages,” and walking “The Long Road.” It all “felt like home somehow … an unpredictable wonder.”
No one looks for a book of poems until prepping for a funeral—so they say. But life, so often, feels like lived lyrics. We live, and the memories stack up like they’re written to a score, and a verse, here comes the bridge, now back to the chorus. And we daily sing—ringing out the lines of our lives.
Poiesis is the ancient word for the action of living itself. It’s the making that happens when humans interact, participate, touch the world with their hands, and look each other in the eye.
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
“The achieve of, the mastery of a thing”—that famous Hopkins line as he watched a kestrel hover in the wind—that’s us being human beings; being and doing what we were created to do.
And we can hover in the wind. We know, despite the iron left-brained-ness of the world, we were made to. If we could just find our wings.
The mastery is life itself. Living it without surveilling ourselves. It’s Pumping Station Road in the summer dark. Can we go back there? Anemoia says we cannot. It’s gone to us forever. Because the machines will never go away.
Finding the Pathway to Hovering
But here is where the word “hope” helps us.
Hope is not optimism about things getting better. It’s not positive therapeutic self-talk. That’s the modern world’s lie. Positivism doesn’t change the structure of your life.
Hope holds so much wisdom for us. And part of that wisdom is agency—the belief that you can initiate movement toward a goal. We need a pathway to reach the goal.
But what is it? We must be able to see this new-old-yet-familiar world, this mastery of a thing, this life lived in the summer dark, this “old way” Jeremiah talked about—that prophet of tears sent from God.
Maybe the pathway involves us acting as prophets to one another. To remind each other, through tears of nostalgia, that we can initiate movement toward a better tomorrow, and it starts today. And maybe the pathway isn’t another Benedict Option where we throw up our hands, move to the hills, and plant gardens, leaving the machine world for good.
The balance of the rustic life isn’t found in the casting away of our tools. It’s found in the willingness to set them aside and dig in the dirt with our hands for a time. Only to hoist up the pickax once again for the heavy work.
The pencil is technology. So is the typewriter. Both give us books and articles and the news. One is the quiet friction of lead on paper—that coarse skin of the trees, beautiful in smell and texture. The other is metal and clacky.
Cormac McCarthy pounded keys in rhythm in his Santa Fe Institute room, giving us millions of words of brutality, hard truth. So did Hemingway. His Royal Quiet De Luxe gave us Santiago and the truth that we can be destroyed but never be defeated. Nietzsche bought a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball as he was going blind, suffering from migraines. His writing changed, a friend told him. He replied, “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
And yet C.S. Lewis advised young writers: Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training.”
Maybe what we need is the wisdom to know how much training we need before we hoist the pickax or the typewriter or the smartphone. Maybe we need to write longhand and learn the rhythms of words before clacking any keyboard. Maybe we need to paint with brush and canvas before we plug in Adobe. Maybe we need to read well, think well, synthesize well, before we Google “what is nostalgia,” before we prompt Claude, “summarize The Iliad.”
I am showing my girls “Pumping Station Road.” Not the actual gravel of that place. But the beauty of what “summer dark in cold falls” can do to a person, an imagination, a soul. I’m teaching them to hold a pencil and scratch on paper. I am showing them the clacking of a Smith-Corona Classic 12. I’m giving them paint to press into a canvas.
And eventually, the pickax.
Because The Anarchist who runs this world likes to bend Dogwoods into machines. The brilliance of the God who speaks from the Whirlwind is that he uses the tools of The Anarchist to burn him to the ground. A hammer pounds a cross spike, but also builds a cathedral.
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I believe the “Exiters” of AI and Apps have the right grief but the wrong remedy. Here are my thoughts, and what I'm teaching my daughters instead.