The train rumbled across the dirt, sending shockwaves of sound and force across the air and land. And so began the detachment of mass amounts of human beings from themselves and their world. Even with the passage of ships across thousands of miles of sea, humans were subject to wind and tides. Through the concentrated combustion of hydrocarbons, the locomotive enables disproportionate movement, a pseudo-freedom nonetheless still dependent on the natural world it desperately attempts to evade through a social order consisting, at least, in the industrial extraction and transportation of coal, the extraction, transportation and refinement of metal ore and the fabrication and transportation of train parts. The power of the hydrocarbon still has yet to be harnessed: except in certain Formula 1 configurations, average thermal efficiency [Useful Work Output divided by Total Fuel Input] is about a third of fuel input.
The concentrated use of energy changes human interaction with the environment. The specific example of the locomotive denotes a disjunction between the experience and power of humans and the natural world through the concentrated combustion of chains of hydrocarbons. Rather than the balanced interaction with one’s environment required of movement involving a horse or one’s own feet, the machine cannot stop or get tired. It does not know a limit except the replacement of broken parts and the fueling of the train engine. Thus, the inhuman machine becomes the active force in global economic development. All those who do not participate are out-competed by its inhuman productivity, even, the humans. Thus, we all become a part of keeping the machine running in the name of greater productivity and profits, even if this productivity and profit lowers life expectancy, causes dis-ease, in the mental and physical sickness sense and fundamentally does not address what it means to be human.
The history of technological development evolves into the disincarnation of the human being from their faculties. As the prowess of technology increases, so does man’s dependency on it. It has increased to the extent that people cannot navigate a few miles in an American city without Google Maps. The phone, rather than showing people how to navigate the territory, has become the territory. The development of this technological incubus is why a century after the industrial revolution, English writer E.M. Forster could imagine a future wherein human beings live entirely technologically mediated lives, discussing ideas and only meeting each other virtually, amounting to living in everything but life (The Day the Machine Stopped, 1913).
The turn of the television revolution meant the publicizing of all things big, small and gossip-worthy. TV is essentially not a medium of substance, requiring subjugation by everyone who interacts with it. It does not pause unless you make it. It does not wait for you to be ready for the next commercial. It is not even benefitted by your understanding
The media landscape created in post-WW2 America instilled a parallel reality in the mind of its watchers. Not only were Hollywood movies made to celebrate lives of extremity, but advertisements served to root the corporate, consumer ethos of the American mind. Before this, people had to at least interact with each other to get a feel for reality, travel to experience new environments or read in order to inform themselves. Now, human beings can be rendered spectator to their very life in their dining room, watching a TV program rather than interacting with each other.
The result of concentrated energy in our minds is a profound destabilization of the ways and limits of reality. The mind, best served by being rewarded for positive effort, is curtailed by the immediate fluff of contemporary entertainment. The ideals of life, the Good, Christ in the other, is lost in the onslaught of automobile, smartphone and television.
The stimuli we are continually absorbing begin to absorb our will itself. It is no coincidence that this time of our greatest technological development is also our greatest mental health crisis. In addition to an environment where we rely on experts to tell us how to live, we rely on technology for basic needs. At the end of the day, what did the human really do? Did it even need to be there?
The technology developed to ease human life has begun to subsume it. We, like babies, are too interested in the marshmallows to abstain.
Veracity as Virtue 