This note is the eleventh letter in the 104-days-of-summer-vacation series. You can also follow the full twitter thread here, and leave any thoughts and comments that might come up!

Dearest Reader,

Cheers to a new week of love and life, I hope you are looking forward to the upcoming days. There’s a strange time dilation effect to visiting India, perhaps the effect of not being able to do much. I feel like everyday lasts forever, and the general atmosphere keeps me from doing much at all.

I’ve been passing my time reading, eating and watching Netflix pretty much. I did however, daydream up this thought today. I’ve written a few notes before on the relationship between technology and morality, technomorality and technology-is-ideology. One of my key beliefs is that to be a technologist is to be deeply human, one of the forms of human agency is the ability to make and use things.

It seems seems to me that GDP, which is the measure of the market value of all finished goods and services in an economy, is also a measure of how much we’re “technologisting”. The act of making and selling things (both products and services) is in fact a technologist’s craft.

GDP on the surface seems like an abstract and arbitrary way of defining value creation in a society. But the lens of, let’s measure the amount of stuff we make and give to each other is somehow a natural reflection of our society’s impetus to create. Ergo, a technologist’s society.

I’m leaving this letter short today, because it is 36 degrees outside and I can barely concentrate long enough to get one coherent thought out. Regardless, I wish you, my dear reader, an amazing week ahead.

~ Shan