It’s Probably Time to Start Lighting Things on Fire

Abstract

This whole “technology” thing is supposed to have started with fire. On the other side of that lovely and violently bourgeois portal of Western scholastic inspiration called “Greek mythology,” technology begins with a sensational, flaming cat burglary. The compensatory thieving of that better- brother Prometheus, or what some have read as his hopeful act of cautious hubris, casts the totality of human techniques and technologies as a kind of widespread, feverish pyromania, a perverse pyrophilia even.