Small Beer for Machinery

Commodification arrived
Depressingly early, it seems,
Given Egypt’s beer breweries

And Uruk’s mass-produced clay bowls
Five thousand or so years ago.
Goods had to be as standardized

As bodies being organized
And not the other way around.
Writing itself may have begun

As an administrative tool,
And don’t let all those priests fool you.
The temples were the factories,

The systems the factories served,
And human bodies the machines.
Writing is for organizing,

And the ancestors of AI
Algorithmic neural networks
Were pressed in clay and baked in bricks.

Maybe for hunters and nomads
Poetry came from the singing,
But the worth of the written word,

However we’re choreographed,
Was always fungibility—
Skulls or bricks, storage and housing.