Brautigan, "All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace"

In the poem, "All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace", Brautigan writes about his predictions on the effects of advancing technology and gives both an anti-technology and a pro-technology message using sarcasm and similes. During the time that Brautigan was alive, many technological creation ideas were just being brought up. Electronics and technology were futuristic, and in Brautigan's poem, he writes about how these inventions will effect the world. When I first read the poem, I only saw the pro-technology message. Brautigan uses a few exclamation marks, like "I like to think (and the soon the better!) of a cybernetic meadow(1,2), which made me think that advancing technology and making computers is a positive thing because I felt that there was a lot of excitement from the writer. The writer includes a simile, "like pure water touching clear sky"(6,7), to describe the positive effect of the future with computers. In the last stanza, the lines "I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature"(16-20), I sensed a pro-technology tone from the writer because I know that many people would feel that it is liberating to not have to deal with labor.
Although I felt that this poem was pro-technology, I also sensed some negativity from it. After reading the poem several times, I started to notice patterns and interesting choices of lines that Brautigan had written to give me that anti-technology message. In the last stanza, I felt that there was a negative message after mentioning the good effects of computers. For example, people would content and "free"(19) with not having work, but having us "all watched over by machines of loving grace" is not a sight that will lead to comfort because machines have no feelings and are programmed to perform duties. In addition, machines and computers are not perfect and have glitches so they may not be trusted to do their job without having problems. In the first two lines of each stanza, the writer includes a message in parenthesis, followed by an exclamation mark, to display sarcasm. The second stanza stood out to me because it provided me with an image that seemed like the world would be in chaos if machines and computers were to take over. For example, having a forest filled with "pines and electronics"(11) and have deers "stroll peacefully past computers as if they past flowers with spinning blossoms" gave me a feel that computers should not be invented because it is out of place and does not belong in the forest. Also, having deers stroll by computers as if computers were flowers gave me an image that the world would become crazy because flowers do not have "spinning blossoms".
Overall, I believe that Brautigan is trying to send out a negative message about technology because the negative points overruled the positive points that I had made. Brautigan uses sarcasm with parenthesis to prove a point to us that technology cannot watch over us. We cannot live in "programming harmony"(5) because computers and machines lack emotions and feelings.