I’ve been rereading Self-Consuming Artifacts by Stanley Fish, published in 1972, a classic of literary criticism on the experience of reading, and now I see its central thesis everywhere. Fish argues that certain texts don’t deliver a meaning so much as put you through something. They build a framework, make you invest in it, and then show you its limits. The text, as he puts it, consumes itself: “it is self-sharpening and what it sharpens is you.” I realize this sounds like an odd thing to bring up in Gear Technology, but one hopes every issue of the magazine is in some way an active experience that requires the reader to work, question their own assumptions, and possibly change their perspective.
Around the corner from my home in Tyler, TX, the Liberty Theater is screening Metropolis. Fritz Lang set his dystopian epic in the year 2026, and now that the calendar has caught up, the film is making the rounds again. Nearly a century ago, Lang imagined this year as an industrial future defined by towering skylines, vast machinery, rigid class division, and workers reduced to components in a system too large to comprehend.
As I write this, I am sipping hot coffee at Caffè Dante in an extremely cold New York City. I flew in from Tyler, TX—which got its own battering—and the severe cold lingering here is a remnant of Winter Storm Fern, the system that covered much of the country in snow and ice. The purpose of the trip is to give a poetry recital at the Amant Foundation in Brooklyn, of all things. Outside, people hurry past with their heads down, powering through what’s left of the storm. It’s a fitting image for the gear industry in 2026: heads down, pushing through conditions not of their own making, waiting for a break in the weather.
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