The walking wounded

We had become the walking wounded, oozing the pus of technology. Lost were our connections to the world. In their stead hung a gaudy bouquet of wires, tiny screens, and touch-sensitive armatures. We were lost, in a sea asunder, no roots, no bounds, no bodies, selfish and pure. All data. Noise gone. Everything and anything was a meaningful input, nothing extraneous filtered through our senses. Godless, childless, and inhuman to the last. We were a self-made phoenix of our own cultural apocalypse lost in a fog of ware. No rituals remained outside of routines initiated by machines. And for that reason we had been circumscribed to the last by functionality. Nothing remained of us that wasn't rationalized into the activity of a buzzing set of micro- and macro-machinery in which we clothed ourselves and pierced our exteriors. This was hardly a new realization because we saw it coming, and helped it along every single step until it bled us of anything resembling volition or desire. We had become simply another routine perfectly factored into a larger program. Our actions were initiated and ended by a vast machinery to which we were connected sometimes literally and at other times metaphorically. But to the world of symbols we had grafted this one last ontological certainty, our functional machines, and from that we derived our last vestige of wisdom, one not lost to the ages of memory but to the after burn of a mere few microseconds when the nerve rebounded from its last stimulus. Our past was an immediate echo. Our culture was a continuously running program. Our life was set to the cycles of circuitry. Diurnal rhythm and recurring seasons could go to hell, and they did, along with much of our connections to a planet to which our existence we still relied upon but to our current realities it had no meaning.

the "actually" routine

"auto-persuasion argot"