O Techno-god!
Save us from ourselves!
“The myth of the machine,” [Lewis Mumford] wrote, “the basic religion of our present culture, has so captured the modern mind that no human sacrifice seems too great provided it is offered up to the insolent Marduks and Molochs of science and technology.”
We worship machines because we hate ourselves. And we have good reason to. We never learn: we keep making the same exact mistakes (with bigger and bigger weapons) over and over again, despite the disciplines of sanity brought to us by Gotama and Jesus in the Axial Age. Those are too much work, and require us to relinquish our dearest fantasies—to “kill our darlings,” as writing teachers say. So we’ve created machines to perfect or replace us. It’s hilarious that we think monsters of our own creation can solve the problem of our nature that every human is born with, like a four-dimensional koan. Seems we would do anything to avoid wrestling with that angel, but if we shirk that (and almost all of us try to; I sure do!), we’re good for nothing.
It seems to me that the situation described here and by Lewis Mumford originated when Christian-ism became the official religion of the Roman State/EMPIRE
The book The Pentagon of Power features some images which dramatically picture the power-and-control-seeking motive/nexus of institutional Christianism with the techno-machine.
At a more fundamental formative level the entire thrust of Western Civilization is to gain power-and-control over everyone and everything
Well, all these little boxes have scrying mirrors on the front, and they pull us out of the material realm into another world that connects us into an internet hive, which is basically what the gnostics always wanted. That should tell us something.