A generation that knew shortage was exposed to great wealth, to abundant possibilities, and sought to compensate for past shortages. Warhol expressed part of a generational impulse to merge with the system, unite with wealth, feed from the system and feed it in return, till they became one. Warhol described a consumerized existence, its cultural heroes and myths, writing 'I paint this way because I want to be a machine. Everything I do is done like a machine, because this is what I want to do. I think it would be great if everybody is like that.
Machines have much fewer problems.
Warhol drew on a twentieth-century tradition of adulatory relationships with idol machines and their dynamism. Yet this paragraph also evidences the cultural shock typically caused by progress and industrialization among a generation whose feet remain unaccelerated, still astonished by industrial phenomena. The bizarreness of the new captures an imagination and thrusts it forward into visionary experience. Ezekiel's vision has been repeatedly cited by alien contact theorists as an eyewitness report of aliens emerging from a flying saucer, even of the Bible itself as an extension of extraterrestrial cargo cultism. What the passage argues more strongly is a human tradition of imaginative merging of mechanism and furious, mutant Nature.