APITALISM: a word derived – like ‘cattle’ – from the late Latin capitale, derived from the Latin caput for ‘head’.
Vaccine: a word derived from the Latin vacca for ‘cow’.
Fact: a word derived from the Latin factum: an act, deed, feat etc. Ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European dʰeh₁: to put, place, set.
When Bruce Pascoe’s radical book Dark Emu (2014) came out, and the Right attacked his account of Indigenous farming traditions, the Left reflexively defended it – as if agriculture per se were proof of progressiveness (ditto inefficient, habitat-harming solar and wind farms). So ideologies fuelled the controversy. Progressives insist that Indigenous farmers were more advanced than hunter–gatherers. Yet whether we other them (like the Right) or strive to identify (like the Left), lifeways counter to ours made their land use sustainable.
We know that agriculture arose around 12,000 years ago. As to why, the jury is out. And was the associated population growth a cause or an effect? Or both? Climate change after the last ice age no doubt helped. And here we go again. As we watch our 21st-century climate morph exponentially, agriculture gets ever more extensive: displacing forests and all their occupants, poisoning water and soil, genetically modifying crops with long-term toxic consequences.
Agriculture originally gave us division of labour: beasts of burden, serfs, slaves, porters, packers, sorters, stackers, overseers, chiefs, kings, emperors, high priests and so on. Thence, private property: fences, forts, theft, laws, warfare, detention centres, gas chambers, mortuaries, cemeteries, storage, waste, inflation, golden calves, cages, hobbles, yokes, carts, harnesses, bridles, bits, saddles, whips and and confinement of formerly free animals and women. And over time, through overuse, huge tracts of earth became infertile. So as cities expanded, the quest for resources turned towards trading, and invading and colonising new land.
And now our civilisation is past its prime, we’re helpless to stop its decline, despite nonstop hype about the troubleshooting smarts of AI, which isn’t omniscient even if its keepers insist that how it knows as much as it does is a mystery. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice of Goethe’s poem (popularised by Disney’s Fantasia), they can’t control what they’ve set in motion. Yet AI is revolutionising healthcare, designing new mRNA vaccines. Should we be impressed? Because the giant fact farm where we all graze on opaquely processed information is headed for monocultural wasteland. It looks like Left and Right – Dems and Reps or Labor and Libs – are opposed. But as governments have rapidly grown to resemble GMO crops, the Western political landscape has lost diversity, so you only get choice on the surface.
As AI, if fed more balanced data, might tell us. Yet, so terminally entrenched is Western capitalism, the dominant economic system for such a short span of history, that we doggedly seek to solve all global problems via its logic, as if no other options exist. Why so attached? Well, for instance, modern medicine has lowered mortality, raised life expectancy, implanted eggs in older wombs, granted sex-free conception, and promises to cheat death (even as mass extinction threatens), while, for our convenience, animals bred to be eaten suffer all-too-frequent artificial insemination only to keep losing their young in an endless cycle of pain, which we can ignore thanks to boundless entertainment made more predictable by the minute with DEI remakes, sequels, prequels and spin-offs.
You are what you eat. The idea derives from a gastronomic text penned by an 18th-century Frenchman. More than mere metaphor, it applies to all we consume. And some of us are more sensitive than others. Long ago, when I first ate magic mushies, I felt my neck lengthen like a stem – like Alice in Wonderland’s neck after a bite of fungus – and wallaby salami shifted my awareness from the folk and things around me to the pathways between them. Yet whether or not we’re sensitive to it, factory-farmed food continues to shape and subdue us.
And as we’ve adapted to a processed diet produced by means that hurt the Earth and all its denizens, us included, we’ve also consumed the information (food for thought) our media feeds us via procedures akin to industrial production. Before the dawn of agriculture, humans were nomadic, roaming varied terrain through the course of seasonal changes, encountering a wide range of raw information. Human perception was far sharper. Our species lived in nature, not beyond it. Today, our information source has narrowed from the whole cosmos to a small device that distracts us from our surroundings: the ground beneath our feet, local sounds, and even the air we breathe. We’ve traded a vibrant wilderness that once embraced and sustained us for a technological maze geared to rewire our brains.
Factory. Factitious. Manufactured. Satisfaction. On the one hand are facts of nature, some of which become folklore as scientific knowledge evolves, or flawed/fraudulent data degrades it. And on the other are facts accessed online via news (fake or just skewed), social media, Wikipedia, and all of the above reconstituted by AI. As the once free-for-all internet grows ever more heavily censored – a trend scarily evident during the Covid pandemic – it starts to resemble selective plant and animal breeding: systematic cultivation of obedience.
Big Tech is our shepherd; we shall not wander. It maketh us to lay down ingrained patterns: it leadeth us to buy still more. It withdraweth our souls: it leadeth us in the paths of riotousness for its own sake. Yea, though we walk through the virtuality of death, we will fear no evil: for AI art with us; its words and its images, they come for us. Thou propagandise for us in the prisons of our animus: thou annoyest our heads with noise; our inboxes runneth over. Surely digital surveillance shall follow us all the days of our lives and we will dwell in the hell of Big Tech for ever. Just sayin’.
Capitalism has sold us the story that we can have it all: Indigenous wisdom, the age-old knowledge of hunter–gatherer–farmers whose spirits belong to their ancestral land; and AI, a fast track to Armageddon birthed from the heads of monomaniac tech bros. Yes, capitalism pretends we deserve the best of both worlds without end, as it tempts us into endless debt.
Each moment of time, in essence, possesses its own unrepeatable quality. But Big Ag and all its baggage enforce repetition until resources collapse. Language, which used to work literal magic, each letter charged with primal energy, has been reduced to information usurped by corporate agendas. Numbers, once endowed with sacred values, now do little more than tally debit/credit/profit/loss, gauge productivity, count off the calendar, and quantify every aspect of existence. And art has succumbed to the fate of endless reproduction: Campbell’s Soup Cans, Frida handbags, genre fiction spawned by wannabes, reissues, reduxes, remixes, remasters and covers of covers of covers over and over forever and ever, amen. Could the allure of Aboriginal dot paintings involve the soothing effect of rhythmic analogue patterns minus mindlessly dull mechanical sameness, because, like the buyers for whom they’re intended, no two dots are identical? Or does the fragmentation of an organic dot matrix mirror our own state, outer and inner, yet offer, instead, a unified (vs. centralised) vision?
observer of times 