By Unknown author - Chrysopoea of Cleopatra (Codex Marcianus graecus 299 fol. 188v), Public Domain, Link

Nothing is more natural or strange than metabolism. It happens on many scales, around us and within us, via processes that involve human bodies and microbes and other flora and fauna... Digesting with and on behalf of the earth’s ur-metabolic system means wanting more than to function as the unhappy stomach that processes capitalism’s excesses.

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There is no big other in metabolism, no consciousness to commune with or learn from... the metabolic era is about submission, subsumption by the great enzyme, the desire for transformative annihilation. Metabolism is an impulse that makes sense at the end of the usable world. If we’ve exhausted our current ways of being and the planet’s existing materials, we must embrace radical breakdown.

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a dream of being relieved of your own agency, destroyed and reconfigured, freed from the pain of consciousness so that you can be reshaped for someone else’s uses... The desire to be consumed and immortalized by technology reveals a belief that your consciousness is uniquely important and your own creation is uniquely powerful. It’s no surprise technologists like Kurzweil lust to be dissolved by their own machines.

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It’s harder to be optimistic about the future of technological digestion if you’re forced to be an unwilling participant in a voracious process of corporate metabolism.