Early twentieth-century migration turned life into self-created improvisation

Evidence

I often think about the courage of my great-grandparents. What mixture of sadness, terror, and exhilaration did they feel when in 1908, determined to escape the torments of the Cossacks in their tiny village outside of Kiev, they packed their five children, including my four-year-old grandfather Max, and all their belongings into a wagon and pointed the horses toward a steamer bound for America? Like millions of other pioneers of this first modernity, they escaped a still-feudal world and found themselves improvising a profoundly new kind of life. Max would later marry Sophie and build a family far from the rhythms of the villages that birthed them. The Spanish poet Antonio Machado captured the exhilaration and daring of these first-modernity individuals in his famous song: “Traveler, there is no road; the road is made as you go.” This is what “search” has meant: a journey of exploration and self-creation, not an instant swipe to already composed answers. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 105

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The road-is-made-as-you-go image and the ‘search not swipe’ contrast feed the trees-as-infrastructure/grafting metaphor essay’s theme of slow, embodied growth versus instant extraction.
• SEED: The great-grandparents’ 1908 journey versus today’s algorithmic ‘search’ could anchor an essay on what we lost when self-directed discovery became predictive suggestion.
• XREF: connects to: Human improvisation is regulated by historically situated conditions — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2147; Migration makes the diasporic experience the paradigmatic late-modern condition; Migration makes diaspora the paradigmatic postmodern and postcolonial experience. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 769 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Migration makes the diasporic experience the paradigmatic late-modern condition #expands (0.80)
• Migration makes diaspora the paradigmatic postmodern and postcolonial experience. #expands (0.80) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 769
• Human improvisation is regulated by historically situated conditions #qualifies (0.75) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 2147
• Pre-modern stranger responses survive in modern cities in modified form #complicates (0.72) — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 67