"Mystery is gone to the certainty of technological principles. So the real terror, the real aggression against life comes in the form of the pursuit of our technological happiness"
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Reggio’s line lands like an obituary for wonder, and it’s pointedly not nostalgic in a soft-focus way. “Mystery is gone” isn’t just about losing romance; it’s about losing a kind of ethical friction. Mystery slows you down. It keeps you humble. When it’s replaced by “the certainty of technological principles,” the world starts to feel pre-solved, a system to be optimized rather than a place to be lived in.
The genius of the phrasing is the bait-and-switch: “happiness” is supposed to be the harmless part. Reggio flips it into a threat by pairing it with “pursuit” and “technological.” That pursuit implies a treadmill, not a destination: perpetual upgrades, perpetual self-improvement, perpetual frictionless convenience. The subtext is that technology doesn’t arrive as a villain with fangs; it arrives as a service, as ease, as the removal of discomfort. The “terror” is that it can colonize desire itself, teaching us what to want (speed, access, control) and framing anything slower or messier as failure.
Context matters: Reggio is the filmmaker behind Koyaanisqatsi, a cinema of patterns and overwhelm, where the spectacle of modernity is both mesmerizing and vaguely apocalyptic. His target isn’t gadgets; it’s the ideology of technique, the faith that life’s deepest problems are engineering problems. “Aggression against life” is blunt because he’s naming a violence without a perpetrator: a cultural drift where efficiency crowds out aliveness, and certainty becomes the new superstition.
The genius of the phrasing is the bait-and-switch: “happiness” is supposed to be the harmless part. Reggio flips it into a threat by pairing it with “pursuit” and “technological.” That pursuit implies a treadmill, not a destination: perpetual upgrades, perpetual self-improvement, perpetual frictionless convenience. The subtext is that technology doesn’t arrive as a villain with fangs; it arrives as a service, as ease, as the removal of discomfort. The “terror” is that it can colonize desire itself, teaching us what to want (speed, access, control) and framing anything slower or messier as failure.
Context matters: Reggio is the filmmaker behind Koyaanisqatsi, a cinema of patterns and overwhelm, where the spectacle of modernity is both mesmerizing and vaguely apocalyptic. His target isn’t gadgets; it’s the ideology of technique, the faith that life’s deepest problems are engineering problems. “Aggression against life” is blunt because he’s naming a violence without a perpetrator: a cultural drift where efficiency crowds out aliveness, and certainty becomes the new superstition.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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