In the dotcom era of the mid to late 1990s. I thought often of my grandmother. Specifically, I began to wonder if the folkways she possessed — like how to douse for water with the forked limb of the peach tree — were just a tiny splinter of a lost body of knowledge. Whether there were others out there in the world like her, who possessed different splinters of that knowledge and its practices. And whether those splinters might somehow, because of the internet, be re-assembled and put to some new purpose.

When I’d bring this up in conversation with my fellow dotcommers, people would stare at me like I’d just said I expected beanie-copters to be making a big comeback soon. Douse? How un-real. How un-important. Nobody lives on the land any more.

We walk on dead skin through insulated, ventilated, carpeted chambers, through grottos of polished glass and granite, into cocoons of silicon and fiberglas and stainless steel, and we are seldom in actual physical contact with the Earth, the very entity that sustains us. That is simply the way the game of life is played, and how most people choose to behave in order to derive productivity and wealth from it.

Today, quite suddenly, we have the ability to change the way the game is played, and Wild Blue Communications is one of the agents of this change. (more…)