I saw that I had absorbed from my family and my upbringing a specific brand of individualism, valorizing and transmitting it unknowingly. I’d done this throughout my entire life, but especially in How to Do Nothing. Around my favored versions of contemplative solitude, so similar to Emerson’s, a whole suite of circumstances appeared in full relief, like something coming into focus. The women in the kitchen made the mens’ conversation possible, just as my trip to the mountain—and really all of my time spent walking, observing, and courting the “over-soul”—rested upon a long list of privileges, from the specific (owning a car, having the time), to the general (able-bodied, upper-middle-class, half white and half “model minority,” a walkable neighborhood in a desirable city, and more). There was an entire infrastructure around my experience of freedom, and I’d been so busy chasing it that I hadn’t seen it.

In an account of designing one of these litanizers for an OOO symposium website, Bogost writes how it inadvertently shocked a visitor to the site by randomly generating a sexist image of a scantily clad woman on the symposium’s main page. Bogost’s response to the visitor’s complaint was to modify the code for his litanizer so as to exclude these kinds of images. For me, this encounter and subsequent compromise is where carpentry becomes most interesting. If carpentry is about exploring how things playfully hang together, the point where this hanging breaks down or encounters resistance would seem to me to be of particular interest. Instead of recognising this disruption and attempting to develop a means through which carpentry can address this challenge, Bogost is happy to have the litanizer simply raise thorny questions ‘in a unique way’ and vents his frustration that resolving the complaint means compromising its flat ontology of objects.