“There is no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”
-Marshall McLuhan
The world we live in has recently changed much more radically in the last few decades than we can fully comprehend at the moment and it is critical to our future that we awaken to this change and begin charting the new maps we will need to navigate the territory.
The territory has shifted underneath your feet. The old maps that you are holding in your hand are no longer adequate. You have likely sensed this already. Features of the existing maps that are missing, old routes that no longer lead to the stated destination. We see these anomalies and for the most part, estimate that there must have been a mistake in the mapmaking. But it was not the old mapmakers who faltered- it is the environment itself that shifted.
We often think of technological advances as discreet changes. An individual piece of technology that performs a specific task is invented, created, then propagated, and adopted throughout society to perform its function. On a certain scale this view is accurate, but to accurately understand the world we're living in today we need a broader understanding. We need a view that encompasses the way not just technology changes, but the way technological advance changes as well.
Counterweight is an exploratory project attempting to survey and document some of these changes and the people talking about them in hopes of finding ways that we can better understand and navigate the digital landscapes we live in without giving ourselves over to them, or abandoning them (and the benefits they have brought to us) completely.
