I have never owned a cell phone. Back when I was a high-end mactech, one of my clients offered me $3k/month if I would simply carry one (it might have been a ruse to see if they could get me to adopt the tech, I don’t know). I refused.

I have watched with interest as the rest of humanity became a new (and profoundly confused) species over the past 10 years. They, for the most part, are oblivious to this… because they all adopted the tech. I didn’t. I watched. From outside. I am still watching. 2 friends died using them. Another walked off a cliff chasing an image of the moon in his f*ck’ng hand.

I will not here tell you what I see. What I wish to report is this. About 3 months ago I felt it was time to acquire a device that would allow me to vet this tech. I purchased an ipod-touch. I have been working with computing tech since the 1980’s. Machines are my first life. Organisms, second — and not entirely by choice. In any case, I watched its transit to my door. From China. When it arrived, I surveyed it with more than my intellect. Here is what I immediately noticed.

I was holding the product of slavery. And this product, so astonishingly ‘advanced’ that we will sacrifice human -souls- to create and sustain it; this product… engineered specifically to create nearly as much enthusiasm as a pet or child… and -receive more attention in many cases than either-… this product that slaves in other nations build all day and after five years of doing this may still not even slightly afford to own… this product that makes me a fashionable god with impossible powers and them a quarter-paid prisoner of inescapably crushing depersonalization… which for them -represents a great opportunity?-

This flat, perfect, astonishing electronic ‘parasitic symbiont’…

…is -actually- made of concentrated human and environmental suffering. And with it — charged, and in my hand — I am become a gloriously falsified god.

You will not believe me. But I will tell you anyway. Each of these machines costs human lives and animals, living places and futures. Not in small number. All your little tweets and transmissions. Your ‘endless selfies’ and photographic catalogs of time. All this must also be surveilled. It ramifies madly, wildly, in a machine-based dimension you can never ascertain the vastness or costs of.

We wear them like jewelry. Comparing and replacing them as often as we possibly can. Little upgrades, don’t you know. It is like the Nazis wearing the remains of the victims of concentration camps as occult ‘spirit transmitters’.

I still do not belong with you for a simple reason: I acquired this artifact to destroy it. And I intend to. And not just this one.

All of them. And what they represent. And not merely out of hubris or outrage or anger… but because organisms are more than machines can ever deliver … and until we understand this… our machines are a deadly threat to our own survival.