Anathem burner quote
Hax the world! Seriously there will be a large market for hacking if this becomes the norm. Surely it will void warranty but shit its gone after some amount of time anyway
I'm reminded of a story in Anathem by Neal Stephenson in which some people thousands of years in the future are having an argument about using a 4000-year-old camping stove instead of an indestructible technomagic stove:
The next morning, the brand-new stove we had bought after leaving Samble stopped working.
…
Cord dismantled the stove. She diagnosed the problem as a clogged orifice, attributable to gunk that had precipitated from the fuel during the cold night.
“You’re fuming,” she pointed out a while later. I realized that I had withdrawn from the conversation. She and Yul had been talking, but I hadn’t heard a word of their conversation. “What is the problem?”
“I just can’t believe that in this day and age we are having a problem with chemical fuel,” I said.
“Sorry. We should have bought the premium brand.”
“No, it’s not that. Nothing for you to be sorry about. I’m just pointing out that this stove is four-thousand-year-old praxis. … There’s no reason to put up with junk like this. A stove with dangerous, unreliable chemical fuel. With orifices that clog. In four thousand years we could have made a better stove.”
“Would I be able to take that stove apart and fix it?”
“You wouldn’t have to, because it would never break.”
“But I want to know if I could understand such a stove.”
“You’re the kind of person who could probably understand just about anything if you set your mind to it.”
“Nice flattery, Raz, but you keep dodging the question.”
“All right, I take your point. You’re really asking if the average person could understand the workings of such a thing…”
“I don’t know what an average person is. But look at Yul here. He built his stove himself. Didn’t you, Yul?”
Yul was uneasy that Cord had suddenly made this conversation about him. But he deferred to her. He glanced away and nodded. “Yup. Got the burners from scavengers. Welded up the frame.”
“And it worked,” Cord said.
“I know,” I said, and patted my belly.
“No, I mean the system worked!” Cord insisted.
“What system?”
She was exasperated. “The…the…”
“The non-system,” Yul said. “The lack of a system.”
“Yul knew that stoves like this were unreliable!” Cord said, nodding at the broken one. “He’d learned that from experience.”
“Oh, bitter experience, my girl!” Yul proclaimed.
“He ran into some scavengers who’d found better burner heads in a ruin up north. Haggled with them. Figured out a way to hook them up. Probably has been tinkering with them ever since.”
“Took me two years to make it run right,” Yul admitted.
“And none of that would have been possible with some kind of technology that only an avout can understand,” Cord concluded.
“Okay, okay,” I said, and let it drop there. Letting the argument play out would have been a waste of breath. We, the theors, who had retreated (or, depending on how you liked your history, been herded) into the maths at the Reconstitution, had the power to change the physical world through praxis. Up to a point, ordinary people liked the changes we made. But the more clever the praxis became, the less people understood it and the more dependent they became on us—and they didn’t like that at all.