to be a human in the information age is to be surrounded by rectangles. i am typing this message on a rectangle. you are reading it on a rectangle. if you put them under a microscope, you would find that the letters themselves (and the space between them) are made of tiny rectangles. and even if you were to write them with a pencil, odds are you would write them onto a rectangle. in a room made of rectangles. in a building made of rectangles. on a street made of rectangles. we keep all of our knowledge in one series of rectangles. and before that, we kept them in another series of rectangles. you exchange your labor for rectangles. of course these days most don't carry many of those rectangles in their pockets. the bank stores those rectangles and provides you a single rectangle to represent them all, which you keep in a sleeve in a rectangle that you must never lose, as it also contains the rectangle the state uses to confirm your identity. to participate in democracy, you must have a rectangle. to leave the country, you must have a rectangle.
nature produces very few rectangles. you know where man has tried to conquer nature because there, you will find rectangles. what we call "liminal spaces" are spaces where rectangles feel inescapable. it makes us uncomfortable because we love to escape rectangles. when we say we're "getting away", much of what we're getting away from is rectangles. the absence of rectangles recharges the spirit.
but, sadly, we cannot stay. we have many very important rectangles to get back to.
it had to be a tileable shape, hexagons take more and fiddlier cuts, and triangles get cramped up in the corners
but that's the exact problem, isn't it
everything being so optimized
but how can I demand inefficiency for romance's sake when efficiency is an equalizer, is necessary, when mechanically plowed fields and neatly packed storage containers feed the world
I can't, and don't, and only now and then look up from my rectangle to the trees outside, perfectly good paper and lumber
with squirrels and sparrows wasting time in their branches.
… and even more optimized than human-made stuff. the reason why natural stuff occurs in all shorts of weird shapes and sizes instead of rectangles is because living creatures are hyper-optimized to their ecological niche
this is true both on a larger scale (e.g. organs and limbs) and on a smaller scale (cells and molecules). evolutionary pressure is a bitch and living organisms exploit all sorts of minor optimizations to get ahead
