This article follows a familiar pattern of essay in the overwritten MFA style that contrasts particularities without ever arguing why one is better than the other. You can do it with anything and create an equally reasonable sounding essay. Here's ChatGPT on why we should eschew air travel for horse and buggy:
"We don’t need another miracle of steel and jet fuel to fling us across the sky at five hundred miles an hour.
We need wheels that creak, hooves that strike the ground with an honesty no turbine can mimic. We need the long road—the smell of manure and lilacs, the way your thighs ache after a day of swaying on a wooden bench.
Because in the air, you don’t hear the frogs tuning their throats in a roadside ditch. You don’t feel the wind peel an apple’s scent from an orchard as you pass.
And maybe—just maybe—you don’t really arrive anywhere at all.
Not the way you do when a horse brings you there, slow enough to see every dragonfly and every dying sunflower bowing in the field."
"We don’t need another miracle of steel and jet fuel to fling us across the sky at five hundred miles an hour. We need wheels that creak, hooves that strike the ground with an honesty no turbine can mimic. We need the long road—the smell of manure and lilacs, the way your thighs ache after a day of swaying on a wooden bench.
Because in the air, you don’t hear the frogs tuning their throats in a roadside ditch. You don’t feel the wind peel an apple’s scent from an orchard as you pass. And maybe—just maybe—you don’t really arrive anywhere at all. Not the way you do when a horse brings you there, slow enough to see every dragonfly and every dying sunflower bowing in the field."