The poem “All Watched Over in Loving Grace” by Richard Brautigan can be easily interpreted in two different ways. The poem basically says that he is wishing of a time in the near future, where we build computers smart enough to take over our jobs. These computers will take care of us so that we can return to nature and they will also be part of nature. The discrepancy is whether this is an argument towards technology or against it.
I can imagine a world where we are all lazing around doing nothing because technology is doing everything. Maybe as Brautigan says we might go back to nature, we might get so bored of doing nothing that education becomes nothing and we all live happily back in nature.
Or maybe Brautigan is making an argument towards anti-technology. Maybe he thinks that technology is going to get out of hand and spin out of control that we are going to make ourselves obsolete that computers will kick us out of society and have to go back to nature. Or maybe computers are just going to control us subliminally.
I think it is more of an anti-technology type of poem. To me the tone sounds sort of sarcastic; he sees this world that does not look appealing to him, and there is nothing he can do to stop us from going there. There are these phrases that are in parenthesis that sound like if he is being brainwashed or it could be the voice of someone eager to see the next advancement in technology.
Upon some more thinking maybe he imagines a world like the matrix; where we are hooked up to a computer our brains live in a cybernetic world. Then the computer just takes care of us there. This might make more sense seeing the word choice; “cybernetic meadow, cybernetic forest, cybernetic ecology, programming harmony, where we are all free of our labors, watched over by machines of loving grace”.
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