When you give a tree an email address

Sounds like perfect Tumblr material.

“I'm birch-kin and my pronouns are xe, xir, xir, xirs, xirself”

The difference between philosophy you read because you want to be well read in philosophy, and philosophy you understand because you've lived it and perhaps come to similar conclusions yourself, is vast. Philosophy, especially of the modern era (not including the last 20 years or so), is mostly limited to the individual (existentialist sort of stuff).

You create technology that links people together in a myriad of confusing and obtuse, symbolic, mush of ways, treating link between person to person like it is an identifiable, atomic thing (of which a computer has limited understanding of compared to that of someone who is socially affluent), that seems to make 'okay' sense just because nothing better has replaced that 'yet'. Then after this is done, you don't expect the academic world philosophy to go completely nuts for a brief period in time?

In colleges we educate on philosophy but to most students that are brought into the classical philosophers, they haven't had the kind of living experience for philosophy to make sense to them, and those that stick with it find themselves in a world that is fundamentally separate and distinct, from the ones that Locke, Hegel and Heidegger wrote about (or not, but it's different enough to make you a little kooky).

There's more connectivity in theory and reason between the stuff that computer scientists dream up, and the stuff that post modernists seemingly automate as of logical consequence, than is capable of being seen. I'm a computer scientist and an artist, and I know it's not as simple as calling one field crap and the other field correct, when I find myself often standing in the middle of a storm. I've read some post modern philosophy that makes a great deal more sense to me than some computer science literature, or developer superstition.

Logic can really fool you into believing there is a singular way to perceive the world with. And it's tempting, because it just seems to prove itself correct, continuously, it creates a reduction in what is otherwise chaos made from white noise trying to perceive itself as anything besides white noise. But with that, I feel there is a great loss in individuality, creativity, freedom of thought itself. You can chase yourself in circles finding every logical and cognitive bias you may succumb to. Is that a reason to step on every misshapen and imperfect sappling before it can turn into a tree?

This is beautiful and moving to me in a way that is hard to express easily. Part of it is probably the sheer tweeness (not using that term disparagingly) of writing a love letter to a tree. I'm sure the samples in the article were pretty much the top of the barrel -- and I pray for the poor oaks which inevitably received a bunch of obscenities [^1]. But still, people are taking time out of their day to email the trees in their city.

I'm sitting here thinking about how this could be generalized into a mechanism of engaging with the world around us, which is possibly defeating the point; this is great more for the emergent gameplay of it (to steal a metaphor) than anything, and I think some weird startup that let you tweet your river would kind of rob the whole exercise of its innocence.

The Internet (or maybe technology in general, as if the two have a meaningful difference at this point) is so overwhelmingly used as a vehicle to accelerate maturity, to make us more jaded and cynical and disconnected. There's something great about this doing the opposite -- a glorified SMTP server letting us be more childlike, more honest and engaged in the world around us.

[^1]: There's, like, a 30% chance that there now exists someone in this world who has sent a dick pic to a tree.

I recall that Facebook allows a great granularity for my privacy!