If you don't fight back in life chances are your humanity will be robbed from you. A food company's best client is a bulimic. A pharma company's best client is a sick person. A clothing company's best client is a shopaholic. A credit card company's best client is a debt slave. And any of these company's best workers are workaholics, who have no time for friends, family, or meaning.

Our entire success as a species consists in our ability to modify and tame nature, though. So at some level the disease of artificial life is our winning game. Nature is a beast. A beautiful wild beast. And now we find ourselves at the point at which we can destroy nature. We are the prodigal children: at very least we can destroy nature insofar as it is our mother. Mother will get over it and move on. At a deep level would like to reconcile with Mother Nature, to apologize for stealing cash from her wallet and crashing her car.

I think we impregnate the few rites of passage that we have left in secular consumerist cosmopolitan life with all of the meaning that seems lacking from other parts of our lives. It's not that birth isn't important. It is. But it's also less important than the love that you're capable of and keeping that alive.

Having a rushed, automated, dehumanized, artificial and bureacratized birth experience is just one way your humanity might be denied to you.