I often think about those ready-to-bake crescent rolls and dinner biscuits sold in your grocer’s refrigerated section. They come in paper tubes. Little strips and wads of raw dough are tightly packed into these tubes. A simple twist and POP! the tube splits open, dough erupts in all directions.

 

I think about this mechanism, the concept behind it, the sense of power it gives you.

 

And then I think about all the evolutionary twists and turns, blind alleys, reversals, loops and circles that humans, and life itself, really, had to make for a need for such food tools to arise. Kings deciding who lives and who dies. Oceans roiling and splitting. Mass extinctions, amassing.

 

And I think: all of it – all of it – lead us up to this point.

 

And I shudder.

 

Chris Weagel

Chris Weagel writes about the intersection of technology and parenting for Wired Magazine. No he doesn't. He can't stand that shit.

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