ABSTRACT
We love to wear machines – anything from sunglasses to a cigar, from watch to car. We even love to carry machines – anything will do, from a walking stick to a boombox, from the Portable Nietzsche to a portable computer. We hate to switch off our engines; lest we switch off ourselves, we leave motors running, the lights on, the radio in the background, the TV over the bar, the refrigerator, or the humidifier. When we die, there has to be someone willing to switch off the machines that otherwise persist in living for us. We look good to ourselves in machines: they are the natural extensions of our narcissistic selves. They magnify us, and at the same time amplify the world we have chosen to create for ourselves – the ‘man-made’ world. There is no escaping our romance with the machine we have created in order to recreate ourselves. Nothing praises our divinity like our machines; nothing else renders us at once more powerful and more fragile. No holocaust is greater than the one we consecrate to our machines, built to destroy us as much in peace as in war, which we never cease to improve for either end.
