This just arrived, written in 1956 and just translated. With it came these lines, pertinent to the age of AI (attributed to "To the Cogs," Molussian Industrial Hymns):
Each day out of machines arise
ever more beautiful machines.
Only we remain malformed,
only we're born obsolete.
Discussion
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In the German:
Täglich steigt aus Automaten
immer schöneres Gerät.
Wir nur blieben ungeraten,
uns nur schuf man obsolet.
Günther Anders on mass media: "If humans, in a no materialistic senses, 'are what they eat,' then mass-humans are produced by making humans feed on mass-products. This also means that consumption turns consumers into collaborators in the production of the mass human..."
Anders on media (not the internet): "This process is fully paradoxical: Instead of being paid a salary for our efforts, we just pay to be able to work. We must buy the means of production we utilize (the receptor devices...) to let ourselves be transformed into mass-humans. In other words, we are paying to sell ourselves."