The Machines Are Talking About Us.


Whirrs, buzzes, clicks, beeps, a never ending thrum. The machines, they are talking about us. You, me and everyone else, a ceaseless chitter chatter. We only know this when a ping goes off on our phone or a vibration on our watches. Sometimes we heed them, other times not. We are beguiled by our machines. They are of us, by us. This is the subtext, the background theme songs of our increasingly digital lives, a new hum overlapping with the background rhythmic sounds of nature. A sound only just come into being. Of us, by us. No longer do we listen to the siren call of the ravens, warning us. The growl of the lion and the shift in the wind that guided us for hundreds of thousands of years, is no longer a rhythmic beat that matters much to most.

The machines, they run our cities, turning traffic lights on and off. They listen and take measure of the air around us and decide when to cool or heat our buildings. They argue with one another over the price of a hotel room and offer us prices through an algorithm that was once created by a human, a recipe for a stew. But the chef left the kitchen and the machines make the stew now in a never ending, low simmer of data rivers and lakes. Sometimes, we are not even sure of the changes the machines made to the recipe. We simply consume.