Comments on: Wall-E, a parable for our eventual extinction

By: patrick

patrick — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:29:11 +0000

Wall-E totally looks like the robot from “Short Circuit”… minus the cheesy 80’s style of course

By: Roy Christopher

Roy Christopher — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:56:39 +0000

By: WALL-E: Here to Save You All | Roy Christopher

WALL-E: Here to Save You All | Roy Christopher — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:49:52 +0000

[...] will shake us off like a bad cold and continue on its path.â€ Dave Allen calls WALL-E, “a parable for our eventual extinction,” and while eschatological themes are disturbingly rampant lately (Children of Men, I Am [...]

By: J. Wallace

J. Wallace — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:48:12 +0000

@Dave–I agree with you to a point, but I think one of our overriding problems in the post hunter/gatherer world is the obsession with EMPIRE. I think an industrialized society could exist in some kind of far-off Wellsian utopia that actually worked in harmony with nature, but human nature being what it is…

I have to give props to Vonnegut for writing our epitaph as a species: “We could have fixed it, but we were too damn lazy. And cheap.”

By: Roy Christopher

Roy Christopher — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:53:06 +0000

Funny, I wrote a bit about this theme recently as I noticed it popping up seemingly everywhere. Compared to the dynamic characters, it seems so subtle in WALL-E. Like Gray, the late George Carlin once quipped, "Humans are like a virus. Earth will shake us off like a bad cold and continue on its path." Indeed.

By: Dave Allen

Dave Allen — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:22:04 +0000

It seems that advancements in technology are always harbingers of the end of something. John Gray’s very fascinating book which was published in 2002 points to 3 things 1. we are already using “living” machines such as microbe switches in chips, 2. we ourselves are biological machines and 3. we can not “save” the earth, that’s a conceit driven by our big brains. The Earth will do fine whether we harm it further or not. It will shake us off or at the very least we’ll be sidelined as a species and the “robots” or conscious machines will do the work ala Wall-E. He also argues that if we had remained in hunter gatherer mode and treated the Earth as animals do we wouldn’t be in this mess today.

By: laternerdz

laternerdz — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 06:53:36 +0000

There is a lot more mainstream media covering issues of extinction lately. I wonder if other smaller instances of civilizations ending have similar trends in their arts.

I wonder if there are any answers in the various patterns of arts, storytelling and philosophy. Hopefully all of this new attention will uncover something that will save our asses.