To fill a plane with city elementalizes brick--it makes that new material primordial, placing it with sunlight in the world's basic components. It's almost as if masonry predated the mason, as if tile, metal strut, and every urban craft arose without intention from the earth. The citizens of Ravnica must downplay the distinction between construction and occurrence: If horizons hide in architecture, only the most foreign to the city have a sense for what it's not, let alone belabor that division. The average Ravnican embodies the metropolis, playing out its structure in his thought.

Tin Street Market by Noah Bradley

This is the second article in a three-part allegory about modern American life. I'm using Ravnica's guilds as a lens for broader discussion, relating the trends in their lore to issues we face today. Part I covered America's political climate and its cultural implications.

Today, we look at technology.

Selesnya, Digital Connectivity

Growing Ranks by Seb McKinnon

I remember when AOL Instant Messenger had an almost supernatural novelty. We came home from school, sat at our little terminals, and talked as if we hadn't parted. Now this connectivity is a given; we're all in constant contact. Being away from our cell phones is so stressful that scientists named the condition, ranking it on par with "wedding day jitters." Our phones became our lifelines.

But to what exactly? We could say "the world," but we'd really mean "each other." Though society is the world for many, camping without our phones reveals what they occlude. Our attention "narrows" to a global conversation. Hell, I can't even drive without checking Twitter at red lights. Social media influences, publishes, and continues to influence my thoughts in a feedback loop. It appropriates my brain into its process, creating--in the sum of all its users--the closest thing to global consciousness the world has ever seen.

Just as social media evangelizes connection, the Selesnya Conclave invites all of Ravnica into its Worldsoul--the transcendental, psychic network of the guild's individual members. But just as our social media trades one connection for another, the Worldsoul's urban context estranges Selesnya from nature. The technology's content is worldly and personal. The wisdom it transmits participates in Ravnica's pomp. When we look at Selesnyan architecture, we don't see a state of nature, but fastidious, desperate control. What does the Temple Garden depict if not its maker's fear of death? We might say that Selesnya's unnatural housekeeping reveals misunderstanding, if not plain disrespect, for what the guild exalts. The Gruul and the Golgari shake their heads.

Simic, Bio-Teleology

Unexpected Results by Mike Bierek

Our symbiotic relationship with technology entails constant mutual influence: I would be a different person without my iPhone, and it would be a different device without my concerns and considerations. Though we create machines, machines adjust our thinking and behavior in ways we don't always expect. We're usually the more passive recipient in this exchange, studying after the fact what happened to us and how. Biology conforms to its tools.

Transhumanist connections between body and machine more closely resemble Phyrexia, but America's Simic is more subtle: It's a dynamic of accidental consequence, of inventions inventing new inventors. My youth at the dawn of personal computing prepared me intuitively for all that's following now; as savvy as my parents are, I still watch them struggle with experimental interfaces I find self-descriptive. My age-based plasticity let innovative tech inside, let it shape my mental architecture until I reflected it. Now I think in technology's terms because they're mine as well.

By embodying previous mechanisms, technological consumers intuit new improvements. What functions examines what doesn't or could better, recursively refining with direction. Memeticists like Dawkins go as far as conceptualizing society as an ecosystem, a host for evolutionary processes on ideological material. Teleology, traditionally anathema to evolutionary thinking, appears to be more present in this interplay: It matters to the technology that we build it for a purpose, since poorly-designed products often vanish from the market; it matters to us that the technology survives, since supply translates to access and possession augments our skills. Technology thus improves itself through the teleology it defined in us.

So, just as Simic biomancers tinker with genetics, engineers produce something very close to living, or at least intelligible in biological terms. Technology won't have teleology of its own until better artificial intelligence, but for now, we see a blending of creation and creator, an indistinct ontology that ratchets both halves forward. We are, in a sense, the same entity as the tools we develop--and both of us are better for it.

Izzet, Experimental Commerce

Epic Experiment by Dan Scott

As mentioned, we rarely understand technology's impact until way after it happens, if ever at all. Whole swathes of academia chase its metal coattails, scribbling in notebooks as it sprints off and laughs. They might steer its course if they could, but no one has that kind of supervision: Technology emerges where it's needed, responsive and prescriptive, and propagates organically through commerce. We get what succeeds.

The marketplace, in theory, weeds out crappy products, but crappiness defies consumer ratings. Workmanship, reliability, and cost are all short-term concerns that look to the immediate for worth. Some technology has nasty long-term consequences, or at least profound ones we might want to discuss. Asbestos is a shallow example: It made efficient insulation, but cancer is far from the wish list. It's unclear how automobiles will play out or even if we gain from our screens.

At the heart of this is a basic uncertainty of what's coming--a helpless vulnerability to our species' self-improvement. Like Izzet experimentation, we don't know until we try whether each piece of technology is worth it. Making that call is nonsense anyway, so we just make things happen, sharing the results as a group. It's wild overall: Plastic ate the world, and sometimes power plants irradiate a coast, but usually, we fly around in bird-ships and document the universe. Earth is a rowdy laboratory with nobody in charge.

Transguild Promenade by Noah Bradley

That's Part 2. Check in for the last segment with American society's edges: the Rakdos, Golgari, and Gruul.

Works Cited

• Dawkins, Richard. ""Memes, The New Replicators''" "Memes, The New Replicators'' N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2013.
• "Nomophobia Is the Fear of Being out of Mobile Phone Contact--and It's the Plague of Our 24/7 Age." Mail Online. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2013.
• "Transhumanism." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 21 Feb. 2013. Web. 23 Feb. 2013.