Apocalypso Now, Rise of the Machines: Mother (Earth) Frackers and Carmageddon

This is the Apocalypse. The natural world has been reduced to parking lots and asphalt, concrete and steel, all for the sake of consumption and convenience, gluttony and godlessness, the opportunity to play master, lord and creator of the universe, in a benzene-induced frenzied fantasy world of cosmic proportions, engineering gone viral, spreading the gospel of internal combustion and external… uh, combustion…

The machines have taken over. We’re now working for them. It started off simply enough, just driving them around. Then they instructed us to build them an Interstate highway system, chopping our cities into bits and pieces in the process, and now they want us to tease the very last drop of oil out of the ground, too, no matter the cost. What will they demand next?

Our cities are no longer livable, neighborhoods divided against themselves and separated by flyovers and exit ramps. We drive them wherever they want to go, and we give them prime parking space. We take them on cross-country tours. We even invented motels for them, an entire new genre of accommodation, proudly parked on the outskirts of town, proudly perched with parking-lot views, and far from those now-destroyed cities, mostly unlivable and unliving…

The machines now have their own neighborhoods, suburbs, admiring the world they created, with shopping malls created just for them, and gas station temples devoted to them, collecting donations and dispensing favors, horsepower thrills without the horse, smell of ass gas replaced by the smell of earth gas, benzene for methane, Hollywood day for night, the interplay of opposites, fantasy for reality and infinity for mortality. It’s all good fun, of course, all part of the game, no harm no foul, until now…

But fracking, i.e. hydraulic fracturing, “a well-stimulation” technique in which rock is fractured by a pressurized liquid” (Wikipedia), i.e. cracking our very Mother Earth’s crust just to extract the bit of oil that might (or might not) be inside? Now that’s sick. We’ll have Hell to pay for that, and Hell ain’t cheap.  Just don’t let the music stop…

Advertisement