Although it treads some familiar ground (Tools for Conviviality especially) this is a polemic well worth a few minutes of your time.
monsters at the top of the Pyramid of Evil […] do have significant control over banks, investment companies and the like, and they will get what’s coming to them, but all this is happening, and must happen, because a technofascist prisonworld is what the technological system itself demands. The supermachine is inherently unstable, unnatural and anti-human, which means the more powerful it becomes, the more rigidly it must control things (and turn people into controllable things) to keep it all together.
Darren, clearly, sees the same omni-monster that Dmitry Orlov sees in his concept of The Technosphere; or that the ‘Matrix’ filmsters show so dramatically in their fables. And he’s quite right to do so. Right too, thank god, that the technosphere - Koyaanisqatsi - is doomed and can’t last. (Heartfelt thanks too to all the gods, for the built-in inevitability of the Long Descent, which is going to kill it.)
Reading this, and feeling the rightness of its multi-millennial perspective, I got - yet again - a strong feel for how powerful the ancient, still-absolutely-spot-on myth of the Fall and the Expulsion from the Garden is. When we were still pre-sapiens members of the genus ‘homo’, or even when we were the very early versions of sapiens many thousands of years ago, were we any less content, happy, supplied and fulfilled than we are now? Or more, maybe?
Or course, I know the knee-jerk regurg of the technology-swallowed, already partially-transhumanised souls: “Oh but it’s made our lives so much easier, kinder, richer, longer, healthier, less-painful…”
Really? We know that, do we? I mean really know, rather than just accept that bland assumption, unexamined, as we’re all indoctrinated from childhood to do?
Steven Bachelor: “…yearning for anguish to be assuaged… reinforces what creates [it]… in the first place: the craving for life to be other than it is.”