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I'm currently reading this terribly adventure-twitch-inducing book Kayaking the Inside Passage. (Though I'm still a lot more interested in some epic river treks: Columbia, Mississippi, Mackenzie...) One of the nicer parts about the book is all the historical details in the overview of each section of the route. It includes this account:
Fabulous! A local cargo cult! There is something about the entire concept that makes me go all shivery. Part of it is the terribly cyberpunk mixing of high and low technology, of radically different worldviews. Cargo cults are what happens when a culture meets another culture that is one or more singularities away.
And of course, we all engage in the cargo cult now and then. If you've ever mimicked some action just because you saw an expert do it that way, without knowing if that detail is important or not, then your road belong cargo. It's particularly easy with computers. Most of the little Visual Basic code I've written is cargo cult: I steal from examples and poke at the code until it works (mostly). No real understanding of what it is doing. It's a fairly effective -- and deeply human -- approach.
They (the natives) promised to construct a steamship on the model of the Beaver [first steam-powered vessel in the area]. We listened and shook our heads incredulously: but in a short time we found they had felled a large tree and were making the hull out of its scooped trunk. Some time after, this rude steamer appeared. She was...thirty feet long, all in one piece...resembling the model of our steamer. She was black, with painted ports; decked over...the steersman was not seen. She floated triumphantly...They thought they had nearly come up to the point of external structure; but the enginery baffled them; this, however, they thought they could imitate in time by perseverance and the helping illumination of the Great Spirit. (Dunn, History of the Oregon Territory, 1844)
Fabulous! A local cargo cult! There is something about the entire concept that makes me go all shivery. Part of it is the terribly cyberpunk mixing of high and low technology, of radically different worldviews. Cargo cults are what happens when a culture meets another culture that is one or more singularities away.
And of course, we all engage in the cargo cult now and then. If you've ever mimicked some action just because you saw an expert do it that way, without knowing if that detail is important or not, then your road belong cargo. It's particularly easy with computers. Most of the little Visual Basic code I've written is cargo cult: I steal from examples and poke at the code until it works (mostly). No real understanding of what it is doing. It's a fairly effective -- and deeply human -- approach.
no subject
These days, I get a strong whiff of "cargo cult" whenever I hear another example of U.S. based multinationals dangling shiny things in front of "underdeveloped" nations, and implying that all they have to do in order to be as rich as we are, is to the play the game by our rules.
Come to think of it, working for an hourly wage feels kind of like cargo cult also, if I go in with the idea that someday I'll be hiring others at the wages I'm making now. Ugh.
no subject
My sis-in-law's best friend canoed down the Mississippi last summer, from Minnesota to whatever that miserable oil town is called, on the tip of the delta where it joins the Gulf. It took more than a month but she loved the experience.