A doorbell in Portland

I feel the essay coming on around 3 a.m. It feels different from a poem, more like a sudden cramp in my right foot that's to be expected the night after a 3-hour bike ride. Whereas a poem always involves the unexpected.

The subject's technology.

Some time ago in the late 1990's I had the instinctual idea that technology was the way capitalism was keeping itself alive. I'm not saying that others did not have the same idea, I'm saying that the idea came to me from so far out of nowhere that I could claim it as my own. That only technology had the sort of material energy that could sustain a system as rapacious as capitalism for the foreseeable future.

{Technology as I'm defining it here is science put to practical commercial use. Computers, cell phones & apps, Drones, eBooks...} 

This technology happened in front of my eyes. The business I was in at the time--advertising and public relations--changed radically. The people who were making the ads (Us) knew that good ads can't be made overnight but the people who were paying us (Them) knew we could make them overnight, and so we did. The people who pay always win. The work suffered of course, had to be just good enough to stick to surfaces, which seems to suffice in the current capitalistic construct, but it's kind of a shame...

...but that's all in the past and I'm awake at 3 a.m., thinking:

--Technology is that which is never satisfied with itself.

--Technology has expectations of us which we can never hope to satisfy, but in making the effort we sustain the system which provides the materials that enable us to live.

--Technology is never happy with us; it's the state of mind that's never happy.

--Technology has created a value system in which it is not only possible but imperative to believe that the future will be better, a belief that is the mother's milk of capitalism.

I want to actually think about all this some more. Why, for instance, has the value system of capitalism, which so strongly favors science (knowing) over art and other matters of the spirit (not knowing) become so intertwined with the concept of the freedom of the individual.