We are living in the days of Narcissus and Noah, without realizing those stories are essentially one and the same, in the same way that Adam and Eve crucified themselves, and humanity itself, on a tree of knowledge. And as high speed fiber optic cables circle the globe like a crown of thorns, we sacrifice the whole world in our quest to be ever more like God.
In the same way that religion champions as a virtue our desire to fall in love with and even worship what is simply our own reflection in the sky - an eternal, all knowing, perfection of ourselves that we call "God" - so we trade our Eden of earth for the apple in our pocket that seduces us like a serpent, with the "selfie" of our own reflection, that will live forever in a utopian paradise where we want for nothing and need nothing, called the internet.
It is there, on the internet, where our pursuit of ever greater freedom is only ever used to create ever greater control in the church of technology and the religion of information. It is where hell is plastered with digital images that convince us we are living in heaven. It is where we stare at a screen to distract us from the screams of those we drop bombs on to protect our digital dream of reality.
Like 2001 A Space Odyssey, the monolith is the omnipresent and omnipotent screen that grants our every wish even as it studies our every thought like a God or the NSA. And the filter bubbles that are increasingly produced by algorithms employed by Google and social media, which operate to augment our knowledge along with the power of our "confirmation bias," are used everywhere to tailor our cyber world to our own individual tastes and perceptions, convincing us only all the more that we are "like God," knowing all, and especially "right from wrong." And like Nietzsche's abyss, the more we look into it, the more it looks into us.
We worship the "death" of Jesus by convincing ourselves it is the necessary doorway to the resurrection, and all because we are convinced we are too important not to live forever. We worship "the profit motive" almost as much as we deny such a term is simply the sheep skin that hides the "root of all evil" called "the love of money." And we blame every social ill we encounter, not on a society "intelligently designed" to maximize profit by increasingly exploiting and impoverishing virtually everyone, but on our failure to devote ourselves sufficiently to a Christian narrative that promises eternal paradise to all who are willing to die for it.
And in the process, the technology that we are seduced everywhere by, by corporations working everywhere to maintain the status quo by addicting us increasingly to a dopamine laced cocoon of a hyper individualized comfort zone/echo chamber, changes our brain on a neurological level that not only shortens our attention span and addles our capacity for long term reasoning (which is but a reflection of the ethos of financial institutions which are increasingly forced to focus on short term profit over long term consequences) but that increasingly addicts us to the attention and approval of others to sustain our sense of worth, meaning, and identity.
All of this, and so much more, is designed to turn us into worker bees, economic batteries for a system that grinds most people into the dust with the stress of competition, and then blames all those who fail to become rich for their ineptitude and laziness, even though it is the accumulation of wealth that is the direct cause of an increase in poverty.
In sum, the monolith in Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey and the apple in the garden of Eden, are the apple iPhone in our pocket, which is also the "tree of knowledge," the cross upon which we crucify ourselves, the pond in which Narcissus drowned in a sea of indium, and the mind and all seeing "electric eye" of God.
In the same way that religion champions as a virtue our desire to fall in love with and even worship what is simply our own reflection in the sky - an eternal, all knowing, perfection of ourselves that we call "God" - so we trade our Eden of earth for the apple in our pocket that seduces us like a serpent, with the "selfie" of our own reflection, that will live forever in a utopian paradise where we want for nothing and need nothing, called the internet.
It is there, on the internet, where our pursuit of ever greater freedom is only ever used to create ever greater control in the church of technology and the religion of information. It is where hell is plastered with digital images that convince us we are living in heaven. It is where we stare at a screen to distract us from the screams of those we drop bombs on to protect our digital dream of reality.
Like 2001 A Space Odyssey, the monolith is the omnipresent and omnipotent screen that grants our every wish even as it studies our every thought like a God or the NSA. And the filter bubbles that are increasingly produced by algorithms employed by Google and social media, which operate to augment our knowledge along with the power of our "confirmation bias," are used everywhere to tailor our cyber world to our own individual tastes and perceptions, convincing us only all the more that we are "like God," knowing all, and especially "right from wrong." And like Nietzsche's abyss, the more we look into it, the more it looks into us.
We worship the "death" of Jesus by convincing ourselves it is the necessary doorway to the resurrection, and all because we are convinced we are too important not to live forever. We worship "the profit motive" almost as much as we deny such a term is simply the sheep skin that hides the "root of all evil" called "the love of money." And we blame every social ill we encounter, not on a society "intelligently designed" to maximize profit by increasingly exploiting and impoverishing virtually everyone, but on our failure to devote ourselves sufficiently to a Christian narrative that promises eternal paradise to all who are willing to die for it.
And in the process, the technology that we are seduced everywhere by, by corporations working everywhere to maintain the status quo by addicting us increasingly to a dopamine laced cocoon of a hyper individualized comfort zone/echo chamber, changes our brain on a neurological level that not only shortens our attention span and addles our capacity for long term reasoning (which is but a reflection of the ethos of financial institutions which are increasingly forced to focus on short term profit over long term consequences) but that increasingly addicts us to the attention and approval of others to sustain our sense of worth, meaning, and identity.
All of this, and so much more, is designed to turn us into worker bees, economic batteries for a system that grinds most people into the dust with the stress of competition, and then blames all those who fail to become rich for their ineptitude and laziness, even though it is the accumulation of wealth that is the direct cause of an increase in poverty.
In sum, the monolith in Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey and the apple in the garden of Eden, are the apple iPhone in our pocket, which is also the "tree of knowledge," the cross upon which we crucify ourselves, the pond in which Narcissus drowned in a sea of indium, and the mind and all seeing "electric eye" of God.
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