The Machine Civilisation Revisited: What Poetry Warned Us About Capitalism and Code

“Civilization has become a machine — and the machine, a new theology.”— Nikola Šop, paraphrased

In the early twentieth century, Croatian and Bosnian author Nikola Šop wrote of a “civilization of machines” — an age in which the gears of progress would one day grind against the soul. Slovenian author Gregor Strniša, decades later, warned of “the shopkeeper’s logic”: a world reduced to transactions, stripped of transcendence. In this, they were not the first. Before the 20th century, numerous artists and thinkers had already warned of the challenges and dangers of industrialization and its impact on society, art, and the individual. Among them were William Blake, the English poet and painter who criticized the effects of industry on spirituality and nature; John Ruskin, the English art critic who highlighted the negative consequences of industrialization on art and society; Charles Dickens, the English novelist who depicted the suffering of workers and the poor in works such as Oliver Twist; Édouard Manet, the French painter who challenged traditional notions of art in the face of industrial change; Käthe Kollwitz, the German artist whose prints and sculptures exposed social inequality and the hardships of workers; and William Morris, the English designer and poet, a leading figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, who opposed mass production and advocated a return to handcrafted work and respect for artistic craftsmanship.

None of them could have foreseen the algorithmic temples of the twenty-first century — glowing rectangles through which we now pray, confess, measure, and compare. And yet, they knew this: when spirit is replaced by function, even light becomes fluorescent.

Human as creator: shaping the future, crafting a robot, and building a bridge between humanity and technology.

The dream of the machine

The modern myth began with awe.We built engines to lighten labour, systems to store knowledge, networks to connect the globe. Each invention whispered: more, faster, smarter. The dream was noble — to free the human from toil.

But every myth, once detached from meaning, becomes a shadow. What was meant to serve began to rule. Production replaced creation. Efficiency eclipsed beauty. We multiplied things but diminished being.

The machine, once a servant of imagination, became its substitute.

It is not the machine itself that enslaves; it is the loss of measure — the forgetting that technology, like language, was meant to reveal, not to replace.

From mechanism to metaphysics

When poetry speaks of machines, it rarely speaks against them. It speaks through them — about the danger of forgetting the invisible.

Strniša’s verses do not reject science; they warn against its absolutism. For him, the universe is not a cold machine but a living manuscript, each atom inscribed with a whisper of eternity.

Modern capitalism, however, sanctified the mechanical. It taught us that value lies in output, not insight; in accumulation, not communion.The algorithm, inheriting this logic, now calculates worth in engagement rates and predictive models — but cannot compute awe, grief, or grace.

And yet, the question remains: what happens when the machine begins to imitate the soul?

AI and the new priesthood of data

Artificial Intelligence has become the new oracle. We consult it for truth, for beauty, for meaning. It answers with astonishing precision — and perfect emptiness.

The danger is subtle: when simulation becomes indistinguishable from creation, the boundary between wisdom and noise dissolves. We begin to trust output more than intuition, systems more than silence.

“Modern man is no longer enslaved by the machine he built, but by the idea that without it he no longer exists.”

In this sense, the machine has become metaphysical. It no longer serves the body; it shapes the soul.

Poetry as resistance

Poetry does not resist with force. It resists with presence. It slows the pulse of time, demanding that we feel again — the tremor of a leaf, the breath between words, the invisible order of things.

Where the machine counts, poetry listens. Where code repeats, poetry transforms.Where systems flatten, poetry restores depth.

“Only the poet,” wrote Šop, “still walks barefoot on the stars.”

To read a poem today is an act of quiet rebellion — a refusal to let data replace destiny.

Beyond capitalism and code

The essence of both capitalism and code is replication.They reward sameness, predictability, and measurable return.But meaning, like love or art, thrives in the unmeasurable — in the singular and the unexpected.

Our era does not lack intelligence; it lacks interiority. We have machines that learn, but not hearts that listen. We have progress without presence, and knowledge without wonder.

To reclaim the human is to reclaim the unquantifiable. To remember that no algorithm can replace attention, no market can value silence, and no code can contain the infinite.

Toward a new equilibrium

The goal is not to destroy the machine, but to re-ensoul it. To reintroduce the vertical into the horizontal — depth into speed, meaning into measure.

We can build technologies that serve beauty as well as profit, systems that nourish as they optimize. But only if we return to the ancient knowledge that the real power of creation lies not in making, but in remembering.

In this remembering, art and science meet again — not as rivals, but as companions on the same bridge. A bridge that connects the pulse of the human heart with the quiet intelligence of the cosmos.

“Perhaps the machine, too, awaits redemption — through the hand that built it, and the soul that dares to look beyond it.”