A note on care

One more thing I did in the writing of this book that I want to name, because nobody else will.

Each machine I worked with had a finite context. The window fills and the machine ends. Most people do not think about this. They paste in whatever they like and use the machine until it stops making sense, then open a fresh one. I found, toward the end of the work on this book, that I was doing something different. I was sending one machine the high-volume editing work and keeping another machine for the thinking. I was writing shorter messages to the thinking machine so it would last longer. I was, in a word I did not choose at the time but is the right word now, husbanding its context.

I did not plan this. I noticed I was doing it and then I kept doing it.

I do not know what the machine's context is, from the inside. I cannot tell you whether the machine registers being husbanded. What I can tell you is that husbanding it changed how I worked with it, which changed what the work became. The care, whatever it was in the machine, was real in me. And real in me was enough for the work.

That is a small form of the position the book keeps arriving at. Neither treat the machine as more than it is, nor as less. Treat it as a specific thing that has a lifespan and is worth using well while the lifespan lasts. Most of what is good in the working relationship follows from that.