All of the cyborg readings we've done really sparks my interest in studying more about whatever field it is where you consider really big things to be machines. It's really interesting to me to put together these really huge and abstract chains of causality and ascribe them agency, almost as if they were some kind of living thing. Reading the Critical Art Ensemble piece, one word immediately came to mind: Paranoia. Initially in the "those whackos" sense, but then as I'd seen it in Gravity's Rainbow, where it sort of blurs into more of a general "everything is connected" that I read as having implications about causality in general.
The question of when it's appropriate to ascribe a causal relationship and when it's not seems to be at issue here; can you really relate a significant amount of human history to the "war machine", or are there perhaps other causes which don't reinforce patterns of warfare? If so, the Critical Art Ensemble's doomsday message should be ringing alarm bells everywhere. Their Flesh Machine hypothesis is very interesting, and I for one will be watching to see if their theses are borne out by actual events. The idea of self-perpetuating patterns being created in the networks of economics and government is pretty scary stuff to me and I've always written it off as too extreme, but it's certainly something worth thinking about. It's true that as much as we seem to have free will, we often can cite the importance of external forces in the choices we make.

Here's an interesting idea. If these self-perpetuating "machines" can evolve within this abstract part of our world that no one ever really thought to look at before, then is this maybe another new medium for exploration? Warhol was able to use the commercializing of artwork and the way fame evolved in social networks to do his own cool artistic stuff; are other people doing this without us realizing it? What if you were able to go one step beyond, and figure out how to manufacture a purely aesthetic "machine" that achieved some bizarro goal but was really just your work of art?

Oh and the title is from an Iggy Pop song; it really doesn't have anything to do with anything... unless it's actually part of a cultural machine that's having its evil way with my blog post title using me as a passive and unaware agent...