This new NY Books essay reads to me like prose and raises some important points about the desire to escape, and believing reality exists in places that we are not:

…when I look back at the series of wilderness travel articles I wrote for The New York Times a decade ago, what jumps out at me is the almost monomaniacal obsession with enacting Denevan’s myth by finding unpopulated places. Camped out in the Australian outback, I boasted that it was “the farthest I’d ever been from other human beings.” Along the “pristine void” of a remote river in the Yukon, I climbed ridges and scanned the horizon: “It was intoxicating,” I wrote, “to pick a point in the distance and wonder: Has any human ever stood there?”

Rereading those and other articles, I now began to reluctantly consider the possibility that my infatuation with the wilderness was, at its core, a poorly cloaked exercise in colonial nostalgia—the urbane Northern equivalent of dressing up as Stonewall Jackson at Civil War reenactments because of an ostensible interest in antique rifles.

As a historian I’d say he’s engaging in a poorly cloaked exercise is escapism, more like going to Disneyland than trying to reenact real events from the past (whether it be the white supremacist policies of Britain or America).

Just some food for thought after reading the ridiculously high percentage of fraud in today’s “wilderness” of software service providers.