Botched Little Animals
We should own what we make.
I was reading a recent interview with the music critic Simon Reynolds — I reviewed his book Retromania years ago — when I stopped short at this:
In one of his blogs, [the late English writer Mark Fisher] talked about going to the countryside and how amazing it was. He said, ‘It really opened my eyes. I now see birds as marvellous little machines’. And I thought, why not see machines as botched little animals?
Yes, I said. Yes.
Ever since the rise, in the seventeenth century, of the mechanistic view of nature, we have been quick to use technological metaphors to explain the phenomenon of life. Declared Descartes, “There is no difference between the machines built by artisans and the diverse bodies that nature alone composes.” The human brain itself — that mysterious maker of metaphors — has through the ages been portrayed as (a) a hydraulic pumping system, (b) a clock, (c) a telephone switching network, (d) a digital computer, and, now, (e) a large language m…