Frankenstein is not just the story of a cool-looking monster. It is meant to be a cautionary tale about how Man’s hubris ends up creating horrors in the pursuit of ‘progress’.
The XXth century saw the rise of many monsters: mechanized warfare, industrialized genocide, atomic weaponry, global pollution. The XXIst century has also began to beget new monsters, and today’s strip is about one of the most insidious: the app-based digital economy.
People reading this might think I’m exaggerating. What’s so bad about companies like Temu which lets you purchase just about anything through your phone? Well, that’s the thing about monsters of our own making: we’re lured by the siren call of their convenience; how they promise to make our lives so much better: no more tedious waiting in line; no more needless trips out of the house—no more sickness or death, that was what Victor Frankenstein was seeking when he assembled his monster. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the saying goes.
The monster we’ve assembled is one that has destroyed the mom-and-pop shops many of us grew up with. It is one that vomits out millions of low-quality, non-durable garbage that sates our craving for novelty for a little while. In order to do so, it expels tons of carbon into the atmosphere to move around crappy knock-offs assembled by modern slaves in sweatshops, from one corner of the globe to the next.
The moral of Shelley’s novel is that playing God always comes with a heavy price. Same goes for acting as if the Earth has unlimited resources.
