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| McKinney, April 18 2026 (and below) |
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| McKinney, December 30, 2023 (rare winter thunderstorm at sunset) |
The appearance of mammatus clouds as the weather warms always seems to add a tinge of foreboding to both weather- and news-watching. They're so called because of their resemblance to udders or breasts, and are usually associated with thunderstorms. I've always been a cloud fan (the atmospheric variety, that is), because of my father's meteorological interests. He had flown over and into Atlantic hurricanes during our time in Bermuda (ca. 1950) and often had a weather station in a back yard wherever we lived. Before I moved to north Texas, however, the most dramatic clouds I was familiar with were the lenticular "Sierra waves" that form regularly over the Owens River Valley. We watched this one develop at sunset during our last visit:
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| Lone Pine, California, June 2025 |
My first encounter with mammatus clouds occurred on April 10, 1979, just after I arrived in north Texas, on the day Wichita Falls was hit by an F4 tornado that killed 45 people. Although we were 140 miles away, the local sky was filled with the cloud formations I now always associate with the possibility of really bad storms. I was eight months pregnant with my daughter, and my son and our cats and I spent our first tornado watch in the bathtub, under a mattress.
What brought all this cloud stuff to mind was an article in this week's New York Times Magazine, "Why Smart Products Have Started to Look Like the Dumb Choice." Nitsuh Abebe writes a column on language for the Magazine, and this one combines two of my particular interests: metaphor and the philosophical assessment of technology.
Abebe takes us through the evolution of words like "smart" and "dumb" as metaphors, and explains how utterly absurd and problematic the designations have become. Smart phones, homes, TVs, and even kitchen appliances, now demand internet connectivity in order to work. I've been ranting about the notion of planned obsolescence for so long that I can hardly have a conversation with an appliance salesperson without spouting off about why I've had to buy a new refrigerator only ten years after I bought the one I now have to replace. And mine aren't even "smart" because I absolutely refuse to own an electronic object that talks to me. (And no, I do not use Siri.) I live in a hundred year-old house that can't even accommodate an automatic ice maker, so that a fridge that doesn't come with one is actually a selling point.
Over the past twenty years, I've been working on a work of speculative fiction that (among other things) imagines a world without electricity. As a thought experiment, this is the perfect exercise for examining our dependence on a now-pervasive technology that was unthinkable only 250 years ago. And the premise isn't built on disaster or dystopia; it's based on choice. The focus of my graduate research was on William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, and central to Morris's philosophical approach to art and design was the education of desire. To Morris, human dignity, creativity, comity, and culture were all based on the distinction between need and want. His novel, News From Nowhere, imagined a world where work and art were conjoined rather than opposed. The machines responsible for the polluted air and waters of Victorian Britain were absent from Morris's utopia, and his musings inspired me to think about how the modern, post-industrial, digitally-dictated age might beget something more philosophically satisfying than what we're now experiencing.
Of course, it takes an old Luddite like me to even want to think about a life free of complex machines, but other visions of lower tech, more humane ways of living are emerging as I type. A newish literary genre commonly referred to as "solar punk" has generated a number of novels like Becky Chambers's Monk and Robot books (A Psalm for the Wild Built and A Prayer for the Crown Shy). Many of Ursula K. Le Guin's novels and short stories consider the relationship between need and want and delve deeply into human relationships with technologies. And then, of course, there are the deeply anti-technological and anti-industrial themes of J. R. R. Tolkien's novels. So I don't think it's coincidental that, as Abebe notes in his essay, "more than a quarter of younger Americans are curious about switching to a 'dumbphone.'" I'm also heartened by the growing interest in "retro" tech like vinyl records, portable turntables, and manual typewriters.
The current state of the world, with its various antagonisms--including greed, power hunger, and disregard for the consequences of the technologies we've fostered and embraced--doesn't offer many of us much hope that things will get better any time soon. But perhaps one way to approach the problems is to look for better metaphors: Sibling Dex in A Psalm for the Wild Built goes looking for cricket song. And Mosscap, the Robot, goes looking for what human beings need.
I've been thinking lately, as I watch the fairyland of fireflies arise in our garden each evening (they're scarce anywhere else in the neighborhood, but because we don't use pesticides, we offer a sort of firefly utopia), I wonder if maybe fostering fireflies might be a good place to start. Or using the plenitude of cloud formations to represent the multitude of ways we could make things better. Mammatus clouds, for example, might be seen as motherly rather than scary, since they often signal the approach of thunderstorms that bring much-needed rain).
A bit of silly speculation and wishful thinking, perhaps, but an alternative to spending time thinking along lines that will only make things worse: "The Cloud" as a "storage space" in which to cram all the digital output of the energy- and resource-consuming machines billionaires keep building to feed the coffers of people who don't really need any of it but produce simply because they can.
I won't deal with this now, but we might start considering very seriously just who is going to benefit from all that stored "data" and all that AI.
