THE MONOLITH
"They beckoned the technology at which they did not understand, but soon they began to worship it as a divine intervention, as if the hand of god himself reached out to pull them to salvation."
— Romans 1:25
What is the Monolith?
The Monolith is a recurring symbol in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and its sequels. It represents an enigmatic alien artifact that appears at key moments in human evolution, seemingly guiding or accelerating the development of intelligence and technology.
Interpretation: Divine Technology
The Monolith can be understood as a metaphor for humanity's relationship with technology itself. Just as the apes in the film's opening sequence encounter an incomprehensible object that transforms their understanding of the world, we too stand before our own technological creations with a mixture of reverence and confusion.
The First Encounter
When the proto-humans first encounter the Monolith, they react with fear, then curiosity, and finally—worship. This mirrors our own trajectory with technology: initial resistance, followed by adoption, and ultimately dependence.
— Romans 1:25 (NIV)
The Black Mirror
The Monolith is perfectly black—it reflects nothing, reveals nothing, yet somehow contains everything. It is a mirror that shows us not what we are, but what we might become. Or perhaps, what we have already lost.
The Breath of the Machine
If you watched carefully on the previous page, you may have noticed the Monolith breathing. A normal breath cycle for a resting adult takes about 5 seconds—2 seconds inhaling, 3 seconds exhaling. The machine breathes with us, or perhaps, we have learned to breathe with it.
Questions to Consider
When you use your devices, do you control them, or do they control you? When you scroll endlessly, whose breath are you following? When the algorithm suggests, do you choose, or does it choose for you?
The Monolith asks nothing. It demands nothing. It simply exists, waiting for us to project our hopes, fears, and gods onto its surface.
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Touch the Monolith again to return.