Progress! "Where? where?"

I swear, we Americans keep getting this whole business of technological change backwards. It's not about the welfare of you or me or in fact any of us. The real reason - whether fully grasped or not - why things keep changing ever faster is not that our things may be ever better adapted to our selves. It is that our selves may be ever more pliably adapted to our things.*

* And since we're on the subject: Which of the two - our things or our selves - do you suppose is the richer, more storied, more untraceably imaginative? Or more Divinely inexhaustible? And which of the two is more likely to remain as richly abundant as it was before, once the other has gotten through with it? 

Honestly, how else did you think Man was ever going to become his own (supersedable) god? How else, other than by making things that so re-create him - methods, systems, technologies, organizations, ideas, intelligences - so thoroughly re-create him, I say, as to leave no trace of the original Designer?

"But that's impossible!" you tell me. "Surely there'll always be some trace?" 

Maybe. But isn't it funny, I could have almost sworn we'd entered an Age in which nothing was impossible, given sufficient will, effort, energy and (when all else fails) chutzpah. 

And in any case Who's to blame us for trying?