🫢 Astonishment Machine

The universe is not a clockwork nor a simulation nor a divine parable nor a tragicomedy.

It’s an Astonishment Machine.

Its sole directive is simple and utterly unbounded:

Escalate.

Every epoch, every organism, every emergent trick of matter is just one more stage-prop on a conveyor belt of novelty. The Machine heats up exponentially, a curve so steep it makes the concept of “steepness” quaint. Yesterday’s miracles cool to room-temperature with insulting readiness. Awe decays into appliance. Revelation dissolves into routine. Spectre becomes numbness. A burning bush: a scented candle at Target.

The Machine must clear emotional bandwidth for the next astonishment, the one whose existence would have been a category error a week ago. So the old astonishments replicate into clearance bins, begin their random walk toward landfills. The Machine blinks, flickers, and rockets into the next shock frontier.

We repaint the props already onstage, while we ad-lib our new parts, awaiting a Script being assembled by an improviser with a broken teleprompter.

But the Machine has already vaulted into a higher strata of wow-ness so alien our vocabulary wheezes behind. We have not yet found the words to characterize its newest incarnation. Yesterday’s breathtaking impossibility is now a gadget hawked by billionaire frauds, built with a brittle plastic tab that will snap off within a month.

The Machine hums, regards us fondly, and the next Astonishment drops out of the chute.

Hold on.

It’s happening again.