<<< Jan 30, 2004 >>>

Otherwise –- if you let emotion trick you into thinking there’s something unique or transcendent about human subjectivity –- you might find yourself wondering why you’ve organized your life as if you were nothing but a machine for the unpleasant productions and pleasant consumptions of commodities. And why, in the name of responsible parenthood, you are fostering in your children the same ethos of consumption, if the material is not the essence of humanity: why you’re guaranteeing that their life will be as cluttered with commodities as yours is, with tasks and loops and input and output, so that they will have lived for no more purpose than to perpetuate the system and will die for no more reason than that they’ve worn out. You might begin to worry that with every appliance that you buy, every piece of plastic that you discard, every gallon of hot water that you waste, every stock that you trade, every mile that you drive, you are hastening the day when there is no more land or air or water in the world that has not been changed, the day when spring will smell like hydrochloric acid and a summer rain will be paradichlorobenzene-flavored, and your tap water will be bright red and taste like Pepsi, and the only birds will be educated sparrows chirping “Just say no!” and blue jays crying “Sex!” and chickens hawking “White meat!” and you’ll eat beef one night and chicken the next night and beef the next night, and all the forests will be planted with the same kind of pine tree or the same kind of maple tree, and even a thousand miles out from shore the bottom of the ocean will be covered with rusty scum and plastic milk jugs, and only tunas and sardines and jumbo shrimps will swim there, and even at night on a remote mountaintop the wind will smell like the exhaust vent of a McDonald’s and you’ll hear car alarms and TV sets and the thunder of the jets in which passengers are being offered a choice of Chicken … or beef? -– and the nature in which all people wittingly or not once felt the immanence of eternity will be dead, and the newspaper which you can read on the computer screen you labored hard at a different screen to purchase will tell you that Man is free and everyone is equal and that Minature Golf Is the New City Game. And how disturbing it might be to find such a world insufficient. And so for your own peace of mind, since nothing can be proved or disproved anyway -– since your science disqualifies itself from answering precisely those questions that concern the mind’s ability to feel that which is, in an absolute and verifiable sense, not there –- isn’t it safer all around to assume machines have their own virtual souls and feelings? -- Jonathan Franzen, Strong Motion, 1992

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