Since the megamachine was in essence an invisible organization, the historic record tells us nothing specifically about its existence: what we know is derived from the details that must be pieced together.
— Lewis Mumford
Whom do you serve? The workforce serves the powerful elites. The elites serve the Machine. And what is the Machine? It’s a dynamic, activated mechanism, an artificial creature reminiscent of the old Golem of Prague. The legend talks of an animated clay giant, perfectly and literally performing the task set before it, not understanding anything else, and wreaking great harm when left to its own devices. In other words, an alien creature. Consider this: we live in an age when some of our neighbors wake up one fine morning seemingly remembering having been abducted and anal-probed by aliens. Well! We have been getting snatched and shafted by the mechanical alien for thousands of years now; isn’t it about time somebody noticed? 😛
Whom do you serve? The workforce serves the elites. The elites serve the Machine. Whom does the Machine serve? Nobody. It’s just a mechanism programmed to get a job done. Whether the job helps or harms is not the Machine’s concern, nor within its competence. Service to life or to general human wellbeing is not its goal. Its goal is the continued existence of the Machine; its growth, its mission, its grandeur, its perpetuation, its enhancement and its power. The living inputs are used up and spat out. The Machine is not evil per se; after all, it’s just a machine! It simply does not concern itself with, does not care about, does not understand, life. Its job is to get humans to crank out more control, more work, more stuff, on and on, without end. A thing is what the Machine is, and it will not stop until it turns everything living into itself.
Its runaway feedback loop has been so steadily reinforced, any negative feedback against it so suppressed, that the Machine has not only taken on an independent existence of its own, but its complexity, its speed, its power, and its sheer careening razzle-dazzle seems to preclude any effective action against it. Until it crashes. From Sumer to Rome, from the Mayans to Easter Island, the Machine’s crashes have left devastation behind. Great gains in knowledge and productivity have been overwhelmed again and again by even greater increases in ostentatious waste, paranoid hostility, insensate destructiveness, hideous random extermination.
This invisible monstrous mechanism now reaches into nearly all parts of the globe. Its whirring geartrain consists of economies, “resource” extraction, work patterns, social relations, ways of thinking and living. Into it go human lives and indeed the living world, and out comes stuff. Once the Egyptian Machine built the pyramids, reaching all over north Africa and the Near East for materials and laborers, for artists and craftsmen, for splendid inventions and precious artifacts, binding them all together into the pattern of a huge, durable, impressive and precisely built tomb. Today, the Machine has grown so immense that it threatens the very life of the planet, racing to build a tomb the size of the Earth.
If machines serve us — as we’ve been told over and over — how come we are working harder than ever before? We moderns each have a large herd of energy “horses” at our beck and call, ready to pull our chariots at the flip of a switch. These “horses” power a great many “labor-saving” devices. Yet we scramble, we are swamped by stress, we have no time, we work harder and longer than medieval peasants. Could it be that the machines, like us, serve the Machine?
Science fiction writers such as R.U.R.’s Karel Čapek have feared future human servitude to machines, not realizing it had already happened in the deep past. Our ancestors had created the precursor to the alien mechanism to serve them, to amplify their energy. Instead, we’ve ended up its miserable serfs. And since we serve the “unliving” and funnel most of our daily energies that way, more and more of our world is transformed into the “unliving.” The unliving expands and the living shrinks, as the very logic would predict.
But when we work less and less at the job of turning living beings into inert stuff, the Machine shrinks. As we turn rock dust into living, growing soil, as we turn polluted, eutrophic waters into living, teeming springs and rivers, as we turn refuse and manure into fertile humus, as we turn the dead into food for the living, life grows and the death-dealing Thing recedes. Using thingness to grow livingness lies at the root of the deep green magic of Gaia who patiently waits for us civilized orphans to come home to our senses. Ursula Le Guin once sang of the real work of human beings: using our knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry; to enlarge the chances of life. We hold the power in the cup of our hand. We shift our allegiance, now.
Whom do you serve? Serve life.
May 25, 2012 at 8:22 am
If you’ve never read it, “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forester (the entire story is available online at: http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html ), which was written in 1909 is one of the most prescient and chilling illustrations of your point. Another book along this line is the classic “Technopoly” by the late Neil Postman where he describes how we have gone from technologies that serve us, to becoming slaves to our advanced technologies. His book is also interesting because he very clearly refutes the idea that technology can ever be neutral, as some would have us believe. Every technology, he says, imposes a certain world view and contains and inherent bias which affects us very deeply.
May 25, 2012 at 8:38 am
Thank you! Such wonderful prose. Such insight and clarity.Will be quoting you.
May 25, 2012 at 11:14 am
I like it…i shift my allegiance now…to Gaia. To “Life”. So simple, so profound a shift…so friggin’ hard to sustain when every day waking to, walking and working and yawning among, deeply distracted by, billions of unknowing extensions of that Golem, that Machine, that Madman behind the curtain whose power needs to be stripped…or else we, well, we here know the consequences…
It’s so hard when the machines that the Machine builds serve so well to perpetuate the slavery by enthralling us, and also we feel forced to use them or “fall behind”. But hardest of all, it seems, is “The Matrix”-like nature of it, the unsee-ability of it, unless one continually awakens from our nightmarish unknowing recitation of that constantly-droning pledge of allegiance (to whatever flag…), and works with others to reinforce that post-Babylonian freedom we allude to here. (And note that ‘alluding to’ is not the same as the ‘attaining of’, certainly not the maintaining of!)…Um, which color pill was that again? Red or blue? And why do i have to keep taking ’em to remember?! Maybe in our confusion, we’ve been eating them both at once..?
Somehow I’d barely heard of the Golem before. Interesting that JRR Tolkien picked up on it in his own way with his “Gollum” creature who was perverted by, re-created by, “the one ring of power”, the ultimate corrupter, who lives within us all… JRR’s small and twisted, but powerful nonetheless version wasn’t even mentioned in the Wikipedia article linked to, i don’t think.
Upshot being, how to live accordingly, as if we no longer share in this near-constant trance, day-to-day? That’s the biggest challenge i see. Where are the “Golem-free zones” so desperately needed? Could it really be up to us to make ’em?
May 25, 2012 at 4:24 pm
Went to a talk in London on Wednesday which will be blogged, but for now, the concept of biophilia will have to do
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophilia_hypothesis
Well written, as ever, Leavergirl!
May 25, 2012 at 4:26 pm
Oh, and on Golem – Marge Piercy has a wonderful book called He/She/It. Or Body of Glass – same book, dif titles…
May 26, 2012 at 6:10 pm
Marvelous writing. The irony of course is that the place we want to get to is already here, degraded and impoverished but vast and patient and waiting…either we sign on to embrace life, all life; or humanity just becomes humus for the next bloom.
May 26, 2012 at 6:42 pm
Yes, our Leavergirl has a way of expressing herself, eh? And yes to Mr. Towers and Mr. or Ms. Vertalio, i’ll sign up for being an admitted biophiliac…if it’s good enough for EO Wilson, it’s probably good enough for me. 😉
May 31, 2012 at 8:41 pm
Gaia, swirling heaven.
Mankind blossoms, then explodes;
the end: just deserts?
June 1, 2012 at 6:54 am
“Today, the Machine has grown so immense that it threatens the very life of the planet, racing to build a tomb the size of the Earth” – brilliantly put, and a great article, thank you.
I’m reminded of an earlier, eloquent piece in Orion by Curtis White (http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4680/) in which he describes what he calls the barbaric heart: “a mouth that chews … a great and energetic actor, but … no better at questioning itself about the meaning of its actions than capitalism is at asking why … unlimited growth is good.”
I love your call to serve life. It’s an especially potent and elegant conclusion in the light of this and your previous articles (which despite my time-starved silence, I have read and appreciated). The vision you present – of humans bringing life with them as they go instead of death – is inspiring and uplifting, partly because it’s not actually that hard to visualise it. The scene is a stunningly beautiful one.
It was something like this vision, forming quietly in my mind (although I didn’t think to articulate it) as I learned of the potential of some of the techniques outlined in permaculture texts, that sent me down that particular path. An explicit exposition of the philosophy, in words and with passion like you’ve mustered here, would make a good addition to the course materials in my view!
June 1, 2012 at 9:45 am
Without knowing what it would mean or really why, in the spring to 2008, I called out to the Goddess, and offered myself up in service. By the Goddess, I mean only the sacred, or divine feminine, and the earth, and so, yes, all life. Blessings,
http://www.offthegridmpls.blogspot.com
June 8, 2012 at 9:26 pm
Well. I hope I am back…
Everybody, thanks for other suggestions to read up on dark premonitions of the Machine.
Steve Hinton, thank you for stopping by! Steve’s blog is here, called A very beautiful place.. http://avbp.net
Hah! Gollum… I did not know the link to Golem, JayD, thanks… though it sure seems that Gollum did very little damage with the ring over the centuries he had it, snagged a stray orc here and there…
Vertalio, good to see you back!
Vanessa, thank you for pointing me to White, awesome stuff, and for reflecting back my words with your own burnished experience. We all here nourish one another…
William, welcome, and I will be checking out your blog!
DT, so where is the write up on the lecture? Been looking in vain… have I missed it somehow?
June 10, 2012 at 1:42 pm
Timely, timely. Ursula Le Guin has saved my sanity in so many, many ways. Getting closer to leaving, getting closer to getting it. Keep up the inspiration leavergirl!
June 19, 2012 at 9:10 am
SO, thank you for stopping by! 🙂
Interesting comment on energy bulletin under today’s article by Eric Curren:
Before we all get carried away by the endless pontificating on the need for jobs, (graduate or otherwise) we should consider what a job is: I work and expend energy, somebody pays me, I take that money and use it to buy the results of someone else’s energy output. That’s the work-pay equation, simple huh?, well not quite. The problem is the energy part. Industrial jobs (and all our jobs, without exception, are linked to energy-consuming industry) in a modern context go back to 1769 when Trevithick invented the steam engine, and humanity hit the jackpot! We spent the next 250 years getting hold of cheap coal oil and gas, burning it and deluding ourselves that it was employment. Cheap fossil fuel energy gave us the means to build machines and they did our ‘work’, all we’ve done is look after them. Not very flattering to humanity, but you can’t build a motorway with a pick and shovel.
However remote, ‘cubicle jobs’ are directly linked to (cheap) core energy input. If that energy input is in decline, then the ‘cubicle jobs’ will decline at the same rate.
Cheap carbon based energy input has been the driving force of world commerce, and by definition our employment. Before the industrial revolution, you worked to produce the food you ate, muscle input equaled food/energy output. If food output fell, so did the population. Then we started burning cheap coal oil and gas in machines, which magnified our output exponentially.
Our machines employed us to produce endless ‘stuff’ and endless supplies of food. The more food we had, the more our population expanded; to employ them, our machines ploughed more land to grow more food and dig more resources out of the ground to build more machines to create more jobs. And so on. This has allowed 80 million new people arrive every year, but we have to burn more fuel to feed and employ them.
We were told that ‘growth’ was infinite. Just about now, armies of unemployed graduates are telling us that it wasn’t. The ‘cubicle jobs’ are the stuff of fantasy. This is why jobs are vanishing. Forget ‘alternatives and renewables’ that’s just political spin to hide the truth about our future.
http://www.yourmedievalfuture.com
June 25, 2012 at 11:45 pm
[…] Mechanical alien (leavingbabylon.wordpress.com) […]
June 30, 2012 at 3:50 am
That’s great the ‘machine’ in this post is pretty much equivalent [to me] to Debord’s ‘spectacle’. It’s complete and essentially purposeless and, of course, incredibly destructive. It’s not as though the driver was dead at the wheel, there’s no driver, except, except [and this is one of my special areas of interest] the current system of finance and economics to provide a feedback loop that directs a buzzsaw on anything of genuine human value.
June 30, 2012 at 9:21 am
Welcome, Hugh. Interesting point! I am trying to think it through… this is what comes: the Machine is invisible and real. The Spectacle is visible and unreal. I am thinking of the magician on the stage. There is the Spectacle of sawing the woman in half. Then there is what really happens. (?)
Can you point us in the direction of more info on how that buzzsaw feedback works?
July 3, 2012 at 8:16 pm
Hello all. This is my first time visiting, having come via the soil post. Very good, the soil post imho, and it is something of which I have a passion.
On this topic, though, I’m a little wary of assigning ‘invisible’ mechanisations to human systems. They are our creations.
Having said that, there is little doubt that once set into motion the ‘machine’ seems to displays an uncanny ability to perpetuate itself. I think JM Greer’s post on systems last week over in the Archdruid Report gives us some indications of how systems become somewhat autonomous and self correcting. There is the tension between the inertia of tradition and the dynamics of what the system produces to the ratio of outputs + pollution.
Yet every machine is designed to take inputs, turn them into intermediary throughputs and eventually turn them into outputs, intended and unintended.
I would argue that all our machines, the natural resources and indeed the meta-machine are only geared to producing one intended output – money. And this output or goal has the unintended consequence of alienating us from the results of our production at every level. Since money, having no tangible value or use in itself, only represents purchase value for most of us, it fails to connect what we do to produce items with what their uses are or what they mean. Individually, we do not produce hammers, for example, we produce hammers to produce money. Hammers are a by-product. Everything in our current machine eventually becomes a by-product – including humans. The other critters (all flora and fauna that are not yet profitable) are not even considered as they’re too stupid and don’t know what money is. They become weeds or vermin.
It’s a confounding subject. It’s very hard to get hold of a central lever to create understanding. Instead, we seem to be motivated and directed by themes or stories which rarely, if ever, conform to our everyday experiences. (Ironically, I suppose I’m validating the invisibility aspect.)
Anywho, the meta-machine seems to crush one’s soul from the first time one’s mind, as a child, comprehends one is watching the tv and cements itself from the process of stepping through the school gates until one is carried through the cemetery gates. Every year the weight of our economy, and those who are ideologically driven by market mania, bears down ever harder on our individual and collective psyches.
July 5, 2012 at 10:58 am
Welcome, makedo! Thank you for your thoughts on the Machine. I did not mean to suggest that the Machine is not our creation… like the Golem, it certainly is. Think of invisibility as patterns of energy. You nail it with the by-product image. Yup…
December 17, 2012 at 3:27 pm
What I like most about your writing, leavergirl, is its staying power. This article is still as fresh and clear — and relevant — as it was when you first penned it.
Others have offered associated reading matter: my recommendation would be ‘How to be Free’ by Tom Hodgkinson. I really must buy myself a ukelele…
December 18, 2012 at 10:00 am
Thank you for your kind words, Wibbler. And I don’t know if I ever said over on your blog, but that “Freedom is a difficult concept” video you posted had me LOLing, hard. What a treat.
Will look for Hodgkinson… comes well recommended.
December 18, 2012 at 3:56 pm
Thanks for the reminder.* I’ve just watched those crazy frogs again (and re-read the comment thread… interesting stuff, wish I could take more of what you say on board, but, like jp said, there are those who, err… don’t exactly go out of their way to allow inclusivity even when the olive branch is offered).
*And the excuse to throw in a gratuitous link 😉
December 19, 2012 at 8:58 am
Think of it as going to a foreign country. Olive branches? Nah. What counts is learning to speak and think another language.
December 19, 2012 at 2:36 pm
I fear that’s one language I’ll never learn. It seems it has no words for the things I need to say, and far too many for things that are meaningless in the universe I would like to inhabit.
December 19, 2012 at 3:07 pm
But if you don’t try, you’ll never know, will ya? Every language has its limitations, and leaves pieces of reality out. English does too… knowing more than one language goes a long way to balance things out. 🙂
December 20, 2012 at 8:02 am
makedoanmend:; I think I understand what you are saying. Isn’t money a form of power?
We must ask; power over what? Power to command the productivity of other people and power to control the so-called resources in the world around us?
Power has no place in real community, does it? It doesn’t indicate co-operation with others. Power is the outcome of competition to dominate and subjugate other humans and, with them, the world at large. This is what people who strive to accumulate wealth feel they need.
Their neediness clearly demonstrates their dependency.
Those of us who have found a way to live by nurturing the living earth, of which we are a part, feel quite independent of the competition for wealth which characterizes modern culture.
A mind capable of independent thinking laughs at the fact that “the weight of our economy, and those who are ideologically driven by market mania, bears down ever harder on our individual and collective psyches.”
It’s not necessarily so, but you are right, that’s what we see happening.
I would invite you to review and question what you were taught during your school experience. What was TV teaching then? How did your parents deal with the consensus reality they found themselves in and how did their response affect your worldview?
” the meta-machine seems to crush one’s soul ” … Yes, differing from the worldview of the parental (authority) community seems hazardous, but “one’s soul” is far more precious than anything conformity can offer.
Think for yourself and act accordingly. Your own well-being is at stake.
January 18, 2013 at 2:40 am
Wonderful post, Leavergirl – very eloquent and I especially like the imagery of Egyptian civilisation enslaving and consuming and building gigantic and elaborate monuments enshrining death. We do the same, building our roads and dams and temperature-controlled skyscrapers and nuclear power plants. And I love Karel Capek! Have you read his other works? War with the Newts and Toward the Radical Center are both excellent and worth reading. Another author worth looking at is Jerry Mander – his book In the Absence of the Sacred: the failure of technology and the survival of the Indian nations is particularly relevant/poignant in the current context of the Idle No More movement. Would love to correspond more – I’m cricket7642 [@] gmail.com and ‘cricket7642 on twitter. 🙂
January 18, 2013 at 1:33 pm
Welcome, cricket! Thank you for the good words and suggestions for reading. Yum.