Energy is "good to think with"

When is the last time you can remember cursing out a piece of technology? A microwave, or an oven? In my case, anger usually involves my "Wilson" from the movie Castaway - a little smart meter which, aside from sitting there blinking the time at me, reminds me all too often (1) how hot it is in Phoenix, and (2) how much of my stipend goes towards paying for electricity.

So you could say we humans (at least those of us in the developed world) have a weird relationship with technology. On one hand we get annoyed when it does not work, but on the other it awes us when it does. We give our cars names (mine is Ally, something my best friend Allison does not appreciate), and then swear at them when they do not work right.

Why though? Is it something about technologies themselves?

Maybe it is something deeper than technology. Maybe it has something to do with what makes technologies work.

Work is a funny word, we use it all the time but really never think about what the word means. When you turn on your smartphone after dropping it, you do not say it is functioning... you say its working. We like when things work for us, and get angry at them when they don't.

Work, though, is not just about things doing what we want them to do, its about things utilizing energy to do what we want them to do.

So, when you curse out your toaster for burning your everything bagel and not working right, you are cursing out the fact the technology did not use energy the way you wanted it to.

The famous anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once said that sex was "good to think with". Sandra Harding said the same thing about science, oddly enough, in relation to sex. So when I say energy is"good to think with" I mean that looking at how we talk about energy tells us a lot about who we are.

Now, this page is nowhere near as heady an endeavor. Just a fun exploration of the weird ways we talk about energy. From giving kids tours of nuclear power plants and letting them put on radiation suits to commercials about net metering that belong with Leave it to Beaver and President Eisenhower, some of the things people say about energy are so bizarre they have to be seen next to each other. 

A word of caution: if you are expecting this to be a space where I criticize the past in favor of some energy future full of technologies that will free the world from [insert crisis here], I am sorry to say you will be disappointed. The funny thing about energy technologies is that while the designs may change, the fact people built them does not.

Anyways, people are much more interesting than toasters.