13: Struggling with Technology: Hermann Hesse’s View on How to Live Well with Craft, Modern, and Cybernetic Technologies
Thomas Taro Lennerfors, Thomas Cyron, and Michał Zawadzki
The machines will attack us in rage,
push us screaming against concrete walls,
run us over, roll over our heads and our hands,
they are strong as the devil but woe unto them!
—Hesse, “Die Maschinenschlacht” (Battle of the Machines)
1Hermann Hesse, The Seasons of Life: A Companion for the Poetic Journey, trans. Ludwig M. Fisher and Stanley Fefferman (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2020), 95.