Any technology; society, language... But I think, at its heart, it's a general metaphor for overreliance, materially, physically, psychologically, philosophical

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...