I tidied up my home office last week, discovering a small pile of books I forgot I still owned. One of them is a battered, neon pink copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Judging by the marginalia, it belonged to me in high school. I read it around the same time I first logged on to the Internet through some old-school chatrooms. I was excited by both the digital culture of the mid-1990s and by the philosophy in Zen. That’s probably why I underlined this paragraph:
Hatred of technology is self-defeating. The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.