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I was walking with granddaughter, Lily along the creek bed when she found this rusting piece of technology in the water. We fished it out and placed it on a boulder.

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I felt utter astonishment that this insubstantial piece of technology, the internals of a smart phone we decided, should be running the world, should be weaving the web of information, tweets, emails, music, visuals, bombing people, operating aeroplanes, delivering our petrol…the list is endless. And yet the boulder on which we placed it is, in comparison, so substantial, registering the slow processes of the planet: erosion, inundation, pressure, heating, a new ice age and the waters receding – sun, wind, rain, ice – to end up here, on the creek bank, tossed by floods. Millions of years have been involved in this narrative. Yet this piece of crap with made in China printed in one corner has ended up in the same spot in a much smaller period of time and is seemingly more potent.

Lily watched me take a photo and then walked across the rocks to the other side while the dog worried a piece of wood. What should I do with this thing now, make a coffin, bury it? But it’s not compostable, can’t burn it – the whole disposing issue is tiresome. I will leave it here, sitting on the boulder. It could become the subject of a cargo cult – Chomski has written recently that society has now become fundamentally disorganised.

Lily returned, her gumboots full of water. She sloshed along for a while, enjoying the heavy footed sensation before emptying them, and then insisted we practice our superhero dance routine in the paddock, where, inevitably the dog will spring a hare and equally inevitably, the hare will be the faster.