Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

Summary

The following submission to Jeremy Friesen’s ‘elevator pitch’-themed Emacs blog carnival is taken from my rather long manuscript in progress (‘the present work’), tentatively titled Voluptuous Panic! I began work on this chapter in late 2022. Can’t gestate forever. The book is about magic and other antirational practices/beliefs. My actual elevator pitch for Emacs is ‘It’s a free open-source text editor where you can modify its code to change its most fundamental features while you work. It’s a lot more complicated than VScode or whatever, at first, but once you’re skilled with it it’s probably the most powerful piece of end-user software there is. And it’s a really great text editor, sort of.’ Think of this as my great-glass-elevator pitch. This chapter is about 11,000 words long and covers a decent amount of ground. I was moved to submit it because of who’s hosting the carnival — I’ve been reading Jeremy’s ‘OSR’ stuff for long years, and there are several passages in here that speak directly to that other shared interest of ours. Thank you so very much for reading, and to Jeremy for hosting. Over the last quarter-century, we’ve learned that access to tools and ideas is not enough. Practice and experience refine handwork and wisdom, make it better, secure a more subtle touch. So, we’ve changed our motto from ‘access to tools and ideas’ to ‘access to ideas, tools, and practices.’ (Whole Earth #90, Summer 1997) It became pretty apparent around 1995 — I mention that year because it was “the year of the Internet” — that … we were headed to what I now call technopathocracy, “the rule of sick machines,” which is to say “money.” (Peter Lamborn Wilson) The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made. (John M. Ford, ‘Against Entropy’) into the weeds In my 40s I’ve been intentionally pursuing several decade-long projects, trying to master a handful of tools/texts in which I’ve long had a passing interest or curiosity, and which require committed study — all of them are feature...