The Twilight of the Machine

[Terry in Austin]

Machinery as myth: John Michael Greer analyzes our belief in "salvation through technology."

The machine is our totem... and most people in the industrial world accord it the same omnipotence that older religions claim for their gods.

...Ordinary people in the industrial world have... a degree of comfort and security that monarchs of past ages have often sought in vain. That state of affairs could never have been permanent, because it was made possible only by using up fantastic amounts of fossil sunlight...

...All this should be fairly straightforward and uncontroversial. It isn’t, of course, because the contemporary faith in the superiority of the machine reaches deep into the irrational levels of our collective psyche.

...This is where the myth of the machine – the conviction, as irrational these days as it is pervasive, that the best person for any job is always not a person at all, but a machine - turns into a trap we ignore at our peril. As peak oil moves closer to center stage in the historical drama of our time... the first reaction of most people in today’s industrial cultures would likely be to insist that the answer was to build more machines.

As usual, Greer offers a very thoughtful historical perspective on energy and society.

[phantom power]

1. "It's nothing that some bigger stone heads can't fix"

[BrklynLiberal]

2. Man will eventually make himself obsolete. LOLOL

[pscot]

3. Kafka wrote a story called In The Penal Colony

that I"ve always thought of as a loose model of our current condition. Like a diamond, it reflects light in a lot of differnt directions. A machine is central to the story.