Have others noticed that real disasters are often preceded by widespread fears about imagined technological catastrophes which do not materialize, but in fact provide an indirect premonition of things to come? The Y2K worry that massive system failures would result from our computers getting confused about which century was beginning did not come to pass; however, the year 2000 ushered in the Bush regime, whose mission was to return our political and legal systems to the year 1900.
This September many feared that the Large Hadron Collider would produce a black hole which would swallow up the planet. In the event, the Large Hadron Collider melted down without doing anyone much harm, but the subprime crisis created a black hole which swallowed up our economy.
Could it be that a collective sense of foreboding not only predicts a disaster, but even something of its essential quality, but needs to shift the blame from humans to machines?