The democratic reign of consumption deprives commodities of any magical value. Alienated mediations weaken people by making themselves indispensable. Nature is no more. The rediscovery of nature will be its reinvention as a worthy adversary by building new social relationships. The same bankruptcy is evident in non-industrial civilizations, where people are still dying of starvation, and in automated civilizations, where people are already dying of boredom.
Every paradise is artificial.
Rousseauism and pastoral idylls accompany the first throbbings of the industrial machine. The ideology of progress, found in Condorcet or Adam Smith, emerged from the old myth of the four ages. Belief in the magical power of technology goes hand in hand with its opposite, the tendency to deconsecration. The machine is the model of the intelligible. But the machine is also the miracle that is to transport us into the realms of happiness and freedom.