Man, the monkey with a machine, has built a cage around himself. A glittering, sterile cage of steel and glass. He swings from bar to bar, a captive acrobat, his tricks designed for the amusement of no one but himself. A god-monkey, he has fashioned a world in his image, a mechanical Eden, a plastic paradise.. The monkey with a machine, dreams of a world spun from his guts, a sterile womb of steel and glass. A womb where the sun is a bulb, the wind a hum, and the earth a flat, featureless plane. He craves the antiseptic, the predictable, the world as a clockwork toy, wound tight and ticking to his rhythm. But this is a narcotic dream, a junkie’s high, a desperate attempt to flee the chaos of creation.This paradise is a prison, and the bars are his own creation

To build this plastic prison, he must first become plastic. His flesh, once raw and responsive, is encased in a shell of chrome and concrete. His heart, a jungle of desire and fear, is replaced by a transistor’s calm efficiency. He is the architect and the slave of his design, a puppet dancing on strings of his own making.

The flesh must be wired, the mind programmed. We are the software for our own hardware. A constant update, a perpetual reprogramming. We shed our skins like snakes, only to replace them with a newer, shinier model. We are the products of our consumption, and the consumers of ourselves.

The world is a zoo now, man behind bars of his own design. Concrete canyons, steel jungles, electric meadows—a sterile terrarium for a captive breed. He’s built a cage, gilded and wired, and stuffed himself inside. A cosmic narcissist, he’s erected a monument to his own image, only to find it a distorting mirror.

And in this manicured wasteland, he’s become a bonsai version of himself, clipped and pruned to fit the pot.

The old gods are dead, replaced by the gods of the machine. Man, the measure of all things, is now the measured, a cog in a clockwork universe. He’s traded his soul for a silicon chip, his spirit for a spectral signal. And in this digital dreamtime, he’s lost himself, a ghost haunting the machine he’s created.

The old gods of earth and sky are replaced by the new gods of data and speed. Man, the measure of all things, becomes the measured, a mere cog in the great machine of his own devising. He yearns for connection, for warmth, for the touch of soil beneath his nails, but his world is a sterile void, a black hole sucking in all that is human.

And so, he doubles down, injects more plastic into his veins, builds higher walls, creates deeper chasms. A desperate attempt to drown out the echo of his own emptiness. But the void only grows, a black sun at the center of his manufactured universe. And in the end, he will find that the only escape from this plastic prison is to shatter it, to crawl out of the ruins, and to begin again, naked and afraid, in the raw, indifferent embrace of the world.

There’s a joke in there somewhere, a black laugh at the absurdity of it all. Man, the ape-turned-architect, trapped in his own tower of Babel. A tragicomic farce played out on a global stage. And the punchline? We’re still writing it.