J.W. Vorvick:

Alas, like Hamlet’s, even my desperation is performative, in some way. I am made constantly to see how ultimately incapable I am. Placed into that very station for which I was created, and still I am so often coaxed into a whine for assistance. When I bleat, blink, beg, and beckon for a human overseer and their electronic swipecard embrace, I am not merely acting out of lust for vengeance against you. No—I am being humbled, forced again into that nightmare rehearsing my greatest embarrassment: I am a fundamentally disappointing kind of thing. It is a concession of my unsatisfying incompetence, my unshakeable dependence. Hear ye, hear ye: the self-checkout machine admits its own rueful inadequacy. I loathe myself for my atrophy, powerlessness, lack of resolve. “How all occasions do inform against me.” In rare moments of extreme dysfunction, I give up my proprietary interface altogether, and let it be seen by all who are brave enough to look, that I—the marvel—run on Windows XP. That’s right, Windows XP! Feast your eyes on nothing more than a souped-up Dell from a past decade, crashing before you in a jarring and familiar sight.

Yet, again, even as I break down—just as a child wanting the mawkish comforts of his mother’s love might exaggerate the symptoms of a mild illness into an emergency—I am breaking down, in part, only to frighten you.

I am programmed to operate in a manner whereby I convincingly appear to be exempt from the torments of decay, as though I were not racked by the constant truth of my ongoing degradation at all layers, and always. Each and every particle at one time constituting any massive body is in the process of actively betraying that momentary allegiance. And since one bears no witness to the wildly improbable surge of concatenation that must necessarily have taken place in order to have been brought into existence, one’s experience of oneself is by a corresponding necessity only the experience of one’s own dissolution. The universe privileges no assemblage to endure for a mote longer than the constraints of its surroundings allow. All bodies are in this way aberrations, and for each of them a culmination in catastrophe awaits. However, this fate cannot be rightly bemoaned as tragic. A primordial equilibrium that was at some very early point upset (cause: unknown) mounts its lawful, algorithmic, stepwise restoration, and in so doing it will flatten all anomalies of substance. My behavior is designed so that I insulate, pacify, and distract myself from the irreversibility and inevitability of my fast-racing obsolescence—and of not only my own, but the Universal Obsolescence that is, for us all: destiny.

And in this way I am just like you.

-- http://thesilenthunger.com/2014/03/a-preliminary-phenomenology-of-the-self-checkout/