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The Machine is a powerful metaphor for government: a human creation which we made to serve us, and to which we have granted power beyond the bound of wisdom. I

The Machine is a powerful metaphor for government: a human creation which we made to serve us, and to which we have granted power beyond the bound of wisdom. It has grown beyond our understanding and control, and it would allow us to die if it could persist without us. When we are no longer able to maintain its vastness, many will perish with it.

titzer 5y ago
The same thing could be said about the Internet, or tech in general.
- bsanr 5y ago
  Any technology; society, language... But I think, at its heart, it's a general metaphor for overreliance, materially, physically, psychologically, philosophically, and so on. It's a little stilted, in that it takes the complete and whole human body to be the irreducible quantum of man's existence, which it isn't, in either direction: people live full and happy lives with missing limbs or cognitive shortcomings, and even the healthiest man will have grave and brutal difficulties living on his own for an extended period. "People" are made up of colonies of varying types of cells (both genetically related to the whole and not), and necessarily make up communities that only can continue to exist through symbiosis. I would take that the actualization of the individual (as many individuals as possible) is the crux around which everything else swings, but the murkiness of the state of our evolution through the cosmos makes it difficult to pass judgment at any juncture. Perhaps the Machine and its collapse is what allows for the Pearl Mist People to carry on humanity without the threat of full and total Venusification of the planet. I feel like there's an ancient Chinese parable about this...
drc500free 5y ago
I see The Machine is as a metaphor for the intermingling of Government, Family, Religion, Technology, and Business. Those systems are the only things powerful enough to keep the others in check, using each of their specific monopolies. When they stop competing, there is nothing left to prevent individual people from getting steamrolled.

titzer 5y ago

The same thing could be said about the Internet, or tech in general.

bsanr 5y ago
Any technology; society, language... But I think, at its heart, it's a general metaphor for overreliance, materially, physically, psychologically, philosophically, and so on. It's a little stilted, in that it takes the complete and whole human body to be the irreducible quantum of man's existence, which it isn't, in either direction: people live full and happy lives with missing limbs or cognitive shortcomings, and even the healthiest man will have grave and brutal difficulties living on his own for an extended period. "People" are made up of colonies of varying types of cells (both genetically related to the whole and not), and necessarily make up communities that only can continue to exist through symbiosis. I would take that the actualization of the individual (as many individuals as possible) is the crux around which everything else swings, but the murkiness of the state of our evolution through the cosmos makes it difficult to pass judgment at any juncture. Perhaps the Machine and its collapse is what allows for the Pearl Mist People to carry on humanity without the threat of full and total Venusification of the planet. I feel like there's an ancient Chinese parable about this...

drc500free 5y ago

I see The Machine is as a metaphor for the intermingling of Government, Family, Religion, Technology, and Business. Those systems are the only things powerful enough to keep the others in check, using each of their specific monopolies. When they stop competing, there is nothing left to prevent individual people from getting steamrolled.