23 April

Think I shared a video from ‘Mr Carlson’s Lab’ before. I love these, though many would find them technical and dry, because he’s an example of somebody with sublime mastery of a highly complex thing, in this case electronics. Incredible mastery, he speaks and acts with ease in areas that would bewilder most. He often restores old electronic goods, in this case an old high-end radio set from the 1930s, that rich families in the US might have owned. This massive set is nearly 100 years old, but as he shows it kicks arse even by today’s standards. It includes something called ‘high fidelity AM radio’, something I’d never heard of, that makes AM radio sound as full as an FM signal. He demonstrates it, it’s amazing. The bigger thing for me here is the level of expertise and accumulated knowledge needed to run even the most basic things in our lives. And how invisible and increasingly completely disrespected that expertise and knowledge is. We engineered modern life so well that people think it happens all by itself, by magic. The people and institutions with that expertise are increasingly abused and told they’re ‘elites’, and instead we should listen to moron influencers on social media, or fish and chip shop owners. Or suburban accountants that are besties with billionaires, who put on oversized cowboy hats and ride through the regions telling rural and regional folk windmills are the end of civilisation.