Life After Daedalus
Be sure to read Rod’s Aristotelian reading of the Closing Credits Sequence of the Year. [Spoiler alert.] Especially in light of this:
A possession, too, then, is an instrument for life, and one’s possessions are the multitude of such instruments; and the slave is a possession of the animate sort. Every subordinate, moreover, is an instrument that wields many instruments, for if each of the instruments were able to perform its work on command or by anticipation, as they assert those of Daedalus did, or the tripods of Hephaestus (which the poet says ‘of their own accord came to the gods’ gathering’), so that shuttles would weave themselves and picks play the lyre, master craftsmen would no longer have a need for subordinates, or masters for slaves. — Aristotle, Politics, I.4 (1253b30-1254a1).
One of the most impressive things about the Wall·E vision of the post-Daedalan future is that human beings do not reach the singularity — and seem never to have to. We may always choose the character of our banalities. I for one will always side against information omnipotence. In its moving tale of the reconstruction of human civilization, Wall·E suggests this will not make me — or regeneration, as opposed to innovation — a horrible bore.
