The Steamroller and the Crutch

The rolled-flat reach for the crutch.

The roller moves heavy, even, and does not ask what lies beneath it. A person under the cylinder grabs for the prosthesis because the system has flattened them to the point where the prosthesis becomes the only way to crawl a little further under what has already begun to crush bone. Digital or chemical, it is always a symptom of one thing: the roller has already moved over the person, and they are searching for something to prop themselves up with. A human being is being crushed by their own invention.

First the species invents a system to serve it. Then the system learns to live on its own, outlives the one who assembled it, and dictates to great-grandchildren how they are to exist. Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens (2011) called this the trick by which our species took the planet: we conquered it through fiction, through the ability to create fictions and agree to believe in them together. Money, the state, law, the army: none of this exists in nature, all of it exists only because enough people have agreed to regard it as existing. But the trick has a false bottom. A fiction believed by millions acquires inertia, weight, appetite, and a day comes when the system is already using the species that created it, and the species that once used the system becomes its instrument. We climbed down from the trees to stop being prey, and we assembled for ourselves a new predator, better than the lion: invisible, deathless, living inside our heads. This is what I call the roller.

And it returns again and again. The wrapping is new each time, but the bargain inside never changes.

The simplest way to see this is on the prosthesis I built for myself. For months I inhabited Obsidian, sculpted what is proudly called a “second brain,” tagged hundreds of cards, delighted in the growing graph of connections. The promise is flawless: offload your head, accumulate points, and one day they will start connecting on their own. They didn’t. The base grew, the graph grew prettier, but real thoughts still came from the living brain and only under the pressure of a concrete situation. For a long time I chalked it up to my own lack of discipline. And then I saw that the reason goes deeper than discipline and is lodged in the very structure of the living brain. I will return to it, to a single nerve cell.

My small failure is not about an app. I, an individual man with a note-taking program, repeated the movement of the entire species: I built a system, entrusted it with the essential, and it devoured the very resource for whose release it had been built. My graph is a small roller on the desk. The big one assembles more slowly, from three layers that have long since fused into a single rock.

The deepest layer stands on basalt. Around 1750 BCE, the Code of Hammurabi was carved onto a black pillar, one of the oldest written codes of law. It matters little how cruel its norms are; what matters is the gesture itself: coercion was for the first time taken out of the ruler’s head and placed onto stone, made external and independent of whoever established it. Law carved in stone no longer needs a living bearer and outlives everyone who composed it.

The second layer is older than any stone, because it is our biology. An animal punished for millions of years for slowness and rewarded for the sprint will grab hold of any promise to become faster today, even if the price is written in fine print on the back. Because of this, the human body becomes fail-safe fuel for any roller that promises acceleration.

The third layer is the youngest and the most respectable, and settles on top like fresh silt on ancient rock: the doctrine of breakthrough at any cost, the cult of the performer who burns themselves out to accomplish the impossible in their sector. I speak impersonally because heroism has nothing to do with it: an organizational mechanism is at work, identical in the workshop, the corporation, the headquarters, and the family where one person carries everyone and calls it duty. I unpack separately the loop of how a system, once shown the executability of the impossible, inscribes it forever into the norm of its demands; here only the geological sum matters. The one who burns out locally saves the roller and globally conserves its disease, laying down their own resource exactly where the system would otherwise have felt its own limit. That is why the youngest layer is always paved with the most devoted.

Put stone, biology, and doctrine together, and you get more than their sum. Codified coercion independent of the human being. A body that itself asks to go under the press. Valor that sanctifies self-immolation. Gathered together, this acquires a life of its own and rolls identically everywhere, indifferent whether beneath it is a workshop, a headquarters, or a family. And the person under the cylinder does the only thing that can be done: attaches a prosthesis to hold on a little longer. And by this feeds it.

For the pearl truly gleams: offloading works. External memory removes the limits of working memory, the calendar and reminders save us daily. Chemistry works too: the stimulant gives speed and endurance, squeezes one more day out of the body, and the first to reach for the crutch are the most responsible. The exchange is real. The poison, as always, is in the fine print: strength borrowed from the crutch belongs to the crutch. Knowledge that lives only in an external system belongs to the system. Alertness held only by chemistry belongs to chemistry. You rent and will one day repay with interest, and every act of leaning feeds the roller: the system is convinced that the human being can endure still more, and next time demands still more.

This symptom is lethal; discomfort has nothing to do with it, and this is visible from the height of a single nerve cell. The error on which faith in the prosthesis rests is older than any app. It was formulated by René Descartes, who divided the world into material res extensa and thinking res cogitans: he surrendered the body to mechanics and left the mind separate. Building myself a second brain, I was, without realizing it, a Cartesian, because I believed that thought could be separated from the body and transplanted into a pure digital environment.

Francis Crick in The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994) answered this directly: you, your joys and ambitions, your sense of your own “I” are nothing other than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells. The mind lives in the physical brain and obeys the brutal laws of its physiology; copying it onto a flash drive will not work, because apart from the tissue there is nothing to copy. Each neuron operates on an “all or nothing” principle, so working memory holds only a few meaningful chunks at once. Looking at a graph with thousands of nodes, I believed I was thinking with all of them. The brain was activating the same four or five.

Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel Wegner described this trap in Science on July 14, 2011, as the “Google effect”: the brain does not memorize information available externally; it memorizes only the path to it, because the very effort of recalling is the act of learning. A new thought is born only when two points physically collide in one head. If one lies in memory and the other in a database, the spark between them will never leap. Niklas Luhmann wrote seventy books in parallel with a card index of ninety thousand cards; the cards were the trace of his thinking, and he extracted no ready-made substance from them. The contemporary user inverts the order, confuses the trace with the beast, and the less effort they make to remember, the less of their own remains.

With chemistry the logic is the same, only the stakes are higher. The stimulant does not add resources to the brain; it paints restedness over the unrested, which in the meantime accumulates fatigue; attention narrows into a tunnel, and the periphery goes dark. But this tunnel and the false confidence that accompanies it need not be detailed here anew. Deadlier is another cost, a subtler one. Under a stimulant, an exhausted person loses the very ability to notice that they are incompetent: together with sharpness, that internal instrument by which it could be measured also goes dark. Not only the skill disappears, but the sense that it has disappeared. The crutch does not simply fail. It convinces the one leaning on it that they are flying, at the very moment they are falling.

And here returns what I began with. Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of the eternal return of the same: imagine having to live this life countless times, without a single change. He conceived of it as a touchstone of greatness. Looking at the roller, I read the same thought with a bitterness that may not have been present in the original. The same error eternally returns, time and again mistaken for a hero’s life. The species makes an invention, gorges itself on its consequences, stockpiles bloody experience, pulls back a little, and then, a couple of generations later, when the memory of the bill has eroded, climbs onto the same rake again, only in newer packaging. Pervitin has already been gone through, the damage documented, the euphoria officially canceled; a few decades passed, and the same exchange returned under other names and with better dosages. This is the eternal return as performed by an entire species: pure relapse, passing itself off each time as experience.

And the bitterest turn is how Nietzsche here reverses against himself. He dreamed of the Overman, of the one who overcomes themselves, who makes of their animal something greater; Zarathustra (1883) teaches precisely growth beyond oneself by one’s own strength. The roller offers the exact opposite movement, and people accept it. The crushed do not rise and do not outgrow themselves. They adapt, attach the prosthesis, and by this feed the roller further. I will say honestly, this is already my thesis, beyond Nietzsche’s textology: the roller manufactures a pharmacological counterfeit of the Overman, a being that feels stronger precisely to the extent that it is in fact weakening.

Harari has the harshest example of this. We did not domesticate wheat, he says; wheat domesticated us, tying us to the field, to the back bent over the ears, to the harvest that must be guarded. We thought we were taking a plant into service, but we rebuilt our entire lives around its needs. The Agricultural Revolution, the greatest swindle in history according to Harari, is the prototype of every roller: an invention that promised relief and brought a heavier rut. We invented written obligation so it would serve us, and now it rolls on its own and demands that we serve it with our own bodies.

The same bargain, only from the side of concession and deferred cost, I have already analyzed in the essay on the illusion of consent; there I was interested in the ethics of exchange, and here in its stubbornness, its ability to return along the same track.

And so that this is not mistaken for a sermon: I am not saying that prostheses should be banned. The crutch saves a broken leg. Chemistry returns to life someone whose body has truly failed. The problem begins where the prosthesis is attached to a healthy leg so as not to notice that a roller is driving over it; where instead of stopping the wheel we perfect the method of lying more comfortably beneath it. The crutch under a broken leg restores what was taken. Attached to a healthy one, it heals nothing, only trains one not to hear the weight under which the person continues to lie.

The roller is assembled from our most ancient law, our biology, and our notions of valor, and no interface update dismantles it; technology becomes only a support for it. The danger of the future lies in excellent technologies; bad ones have nothing to do with it. Excellent ones will come: external memory more seductive than any card index, and chemistry more precise than Pervitin. The same prognosis, about the perfect interface-negotiator designed so that we surrender what is ours with a feeling of winning, I already unfolded in the essay on the illusion of consent; I will only repeat the conclusion: the terms of the bargain have not changed in eighty years; only the packaging is being polished. The roller will wait until we forget the previous bill, and will present it again.

What then is to be done by the one being rolled over by the cylinder? No gesture by a single person will stop a roller assembled over millennia. But there is a difference between one who understands what is beneath them and one who believes that the crutch is their own new strength. The first preserves the only apparatus that is always with them, knowing its limits. The second leases this apparatus and calls the lease growth, until one morning they discover they have nothing left with which to repay. The entire anthropology of this question reduces to one sober distinction: you can only extend what is alive. The digital graph, the chemical confidence, the codex on stone: all of this is only lubricant, squeezed out of a living, rested, not-yet-rolled-flat human being so that the wheel may roll over them more easily. Strength can be rented. But rented strength does not belong to you, and the wheel remembers this better than you do.