Nature and Given-ness (Zine 2025-1)
What if the Machinae Ex Deo have been here all along?
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This zine, which began as a paper, then a blog, then a podcast, was born out of an intense frustration many years ago. Frustration with modern technology.
It seemed that the technology was taking on a life of its own. A life that did not coexist well with the human life that concieved it yet sought to continue promulgating and controlling it.
The term "deus ex machina" is a term from theatre. It means, "god from the machine": something inexplicably brought from who-knows-where and brought onstage to resolve a problem through "divine" intervention. Many products of modernity are marketed in this way: the miracle drug, the one-stop-shop, the only tool you'll ever need.
What if we inverted this phrase?
What if we sought not gods from mechanisms, but mechanisms from God?
The Machinae Ex Deo.
For years, I pondered the ways of God, and what they might imply for such machinery. As I trodded through my frustration and came back to agriculture it hit me like a ton of bricks: ruminants, like cows and sheep, are Machinae Ex Deo par excellence.
Of course, it's not just them, but all biology - the cosmos itself even. The mechanisms of our salvation abound. They are given to us. They have a nature and complexity with inexhaustible comprehensibility. We tend to ignore it, or at least we assume that only what we fabricate or that which we alter is worthwhile.
It's prideful, really.
I admit, the answers to my questions exceeded my virtue. A part of me still wanted - perhaps still does want - to appropriate what is given…
