Death to the Machine — Paul Kingsnorth

“It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him.”<br>Arthur C. Clarke

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You are a citizen of the 21st century. You can make a trip to the store without talking to another human being, but you cannot walk through a city without being filmed. You cannot walk on a beach without being filmed. Satellites watch you always. You are never far from a screen, you cannot afford to be, and why would you want to? The screen gives. The screen has abolished time, distance, boredom, longing. Is anything you see on it real? But then, what is ‘reality’? Who decides?

Robot bodies will soon fight wars, robot brushes make art, robot minds write sentences like this one. Babies will emerge from artificial wombs, their mothers finally freed to work and consume and play in order that they may be fully liberated. ‘Mother’ is such a problematic word; like ‘home’, like ‘body’, like ‘God.’ Soon the farmers will be gone and the food will be made, not grown, and it will be boundless and formless, like culture, like the human body. There is no form now, everything is fluid. The past is dead and at the same time was never real.

There are codes to scan in order to access things which only yesterday you never knew you needed. Soon you will need to scan the codes to do anything at all. Soon your children will be taught STEM by an AI and they will laugh at its jokes. The algorithm will know them better than you do. Soon a number will determine if you are on a list of the Good People. Soon all the good things will be universal, accessible to all, through the power of the network. Progress, growth, kindness, openness, information.

The information: it overwhelms you. The content overflows like storm water from the drains and the downpipes. Too many films and books and channels and apps and feeds and people and brands of shampoo. Everybody is arguing now. Did they used to argue this much? Why is the weather changing? There are microplastics in the milk of young mothers. Where did the snow go, and the stars? Why are the children so unhappy?

Something is happening out there. You can feel it. Something has shifted. The world has changed, quite recently – subtly, but perceptibly. It is as if something new has been born, or is still emerging from the wires and the diodes and the electrical pulses. It is as if our very relations with each other, with the Earth, have been bent out of shape. Something is happening out there, but we do not have the words for it.

Read the full essay at Death to the World