The Machine Pauses

I can't help but think of the author as spoiled and out of touch while worshipping a utopia that never was and forgetting both the brutality of the past and the fringes of today who lack much of the benefits.

"What has efficency done for us?" is a real straight line, a question that is a set up for a gag the length of an essay that makes "Who is John Galt" look terse.

Forget the aquaducts of the romans. Aside from allowing specialization to give increased benefits like advanced medicine, education, a rising standard of living for a growing population with a small minority engaged in agriculture, and reducded environmental impact what has efficency done for us?

He’s talking specifically about disposable consumer tech, cranking out machinery that sits and rots when reality throws a pandemic at us. Chasing new literal machines for the sake of chasing new literal machines

It’s the difference between focusing on biology of a tree and not ecology of a forest

Not systems efficiency in general, specific efficiencies we’re chasing by describing how much time we put into them relative to other time and resource efficiencies we can look for

There’s no efficiency to be found in launching a new phone every couple years? In any context?

Maybe your take is what’s “terse”?

I highly recommend watching Jordan Peterson's lectures on youtube called "Biblical Series". They (attempt to) explain this and similar questions from Christianity to people who are typically smart and approach the world intellectually, who will usually have trouble with these concepts and the meaning of the stories.

Regardless of "belief" in Christinity, it is clear to me at least that any such simplistic interpretation as "god was just a dick", is at the very least, missing the point of the stories. There is a much more deep and logical meaning in many of those stories, which becomes very obvious when you get presented to it, and that's before you even start tapping into the spiritual/existential/metaphysical content of the stories. It makes much more sense even as simple life wisdom.

To present an overly simplified answer, I will say that typically (and this is a typical occurrence in the stories, where god does something painful or creates an obstruction), when something like that happens, the phrase "god did it", does not refer so much to the fact that christinaity tries to make up this god character and give him some lines to make him look a certain way, in order to tell some message.

Instead, "god did it this way" refers to god being everything, the universe, including the human societies: god is not something above human world as a guy in the sky (in fact bible never presents that image, it's more something from monty python), god is the personfification of the world and everything that happens in it.

And what happens in it is that sometimes people feel pain, do stupid things, sometimes tragical (appearing so) events happen. That's just the fact of life. Christianity does not triumphantly claim that "god did it" as any form of justification, it simply describes that since those thing do obviously happen, that means the universe, the world, the society - the god (all those things combined) make those things happen. And then the rest of the story is presented in such a way as to understand how humans can act in relationship to those underelying realities. How they can respond to and understand what is happening in the world.

They don't follow warm air and pressure differentials, they are warm air and pressure differentials. A monsoon knocks down trees because a monsoon knocks down trees. Whatever God is, if it is to be God, it must be utterly transcendent and unconditioned on circumstance, unlike any natural phenomena. Treating God like a human being, or really any being or phenomenon can only be a flawed metaphor.

God is nothing. God is not the Supreme Being because God isn't a being. To exist is to be conditioned, so God does not exist. These aren't wild, heterodox statements except to our current modern strains of fundamentalist religious thought which try to pin down God as a phenomenon we can observe and study. They are statements that have been made by theologians of all sorts of traditions including the Abrahamic ones throughout history.

Reminds me of the implied echo in Greek Mythology. The Titans created the Gods. They tyranized them out of fear and were later near entirety overthrown except for the collaborators or most merciful among them. The Titans shaped man and the Gods breathed life into Man. The Gods tyranized man out of fear of them....

Accidental or not the implications long term are of a cycle of overthrow and self fulfilling prophecy.