More, more, more war
Humans lag in race against machines
Seamless and streamlined. Efficient. Instant. Those are the moral pillars of a global culture prioritizing convenience. A product or an experience that does not include these values is sub par. We move, communicate, travel, produce, consume, and create waste at a pace that far exceeds historical example, all thanks to the latest innovations in gadgetry. And with more and more innovation on the horizon, it is clear that the pace of life will only get faster, rocketing us into the future.
The same occurred in the 20th Century, leading to humanity’s first industrial wars, Korea, Vietnam, etc. A path had to be cleared. People had to conform to the ethos of industrialism. Anything old was against everything new. The pace of agrarian societies had to pick up or risk irrelevance in the course of history. Many languages and indigenous cultures went extinct. We reasoned it was necessary for the advancement of the machine, which would save humanity from its biological limitations.
We are at such a crossroads again, but leaps of innovation are happening all over the globe, simultaneously. Earlier models of state-based industrial societies can no longer keep pace. And as a result, history has earned a new set of wings. It will soar as never before, but for humanity this simply means more, more war and swifter annihilations. We can already hear the incessant mowing in the background and the screams and terror of those who love their roots and want to hold on to them.
The killing is streamlined, seamless, and efficient. Like a surgical removal. A quick cut. A genocide. A removal from the living-knot of human heritage. A convenient extinction. The pace is so instant that our laws and learning can’t respond effectively, bound as they are to a time when history moved at a much slower, less efficient pace.
It has been nothing short of agony to watch how pathetically our institutions perform against the new pace of the machine. We no longer have the luxury of seasons. Of day and night. Of hours, minutes, seconds. Before our eyes, entire populations are warehoused and slaughtered. By the time our institutions catch up, it is far too late. The genocide has occurred. We wring our hands, saying there was nothing we could do. Law and order take time. We hadn’t enough time. Our only option was to throw ourselves in the path of the war machine. No, no. It was impossible. We’d lose everything if we did that. Our voices would not be heard. The war machine would mow right over us. You can’t argue with hellfire rockets and quadcopter drones (unless you’re Palestinian). You can’t restrain industrial warfare with words and ideals. You can’t withstand the rushing winds of machine history (we must stop saying human history). Not without losing everything. Not without great inconvenience. Not without an enormous effort of the human spirit, which we haven’t time to muster. It’s a race we can’t win. Human society is far too inefficient, disorderly, time-consuming. We all know such products are useless—against the spirit of the age. We can only hold on as history goes warp-speed into the greatest, fastest, most convenient extinction man has ever seen.
Our race with the machine ends when we end.
The machine stops when our highest value is no longer convenience.