American Malware

We are in great haste [...]
Walden

Forty-five men died in the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. It stopped working three weeks later. When they eventually laid another, it would cost the average of those dead men ten weeks' salary to send a message with it. There was a parade to celebrate the success.

The result? An efficiency gain of "8 percent of the annual export value of American cotton."

By plugging into America, Great Britain downloaded the first malware – a deadly program comprised of Capitalism, Protestantism, and The Clock.

• Capitalism: demands efficiency, values profit over people
• Protestantism: instills a tireless work ethic - measures individual worth by productivity
• The Clock: turns one's time into a commodity^[1]

1. Technically monks did this one. The clock was fine before they bastardized it. They took the sundial, which theretofore was used as an instrument of observation and planning (think timing of astrological observations, or planning of war), and turned it into an instrument that indicated when one's daily (liturgical) acts were to be performed. I can't stop thinking about how impactful their decision on my life has been. They enabled us to do wondrous things. But American Malware is and always has been a trojan horse crafted for this era - for extraction of value from the intangible, profit from air. (ChatGPT costs as much as the installation of one transatlantic telegraph cable every day, 365 days a year.) I'm not sure exactly how much "badness" this will all convert to in the end, but it has, and will.