Hermes Goes Live: Greek Gods Bewildered by 2026’s Self-Driving Chariots and Mortal Madness

These mortals just gave a chariot a mind of its own. And then they told it to obey the traffic laws! APOLLO, ARE YOU HEARING THIS? NO, NOT YOU, THE OTHER ONE. The point is, there is no poetry! It's a divine affront. I am Hermes. And this is a message for my father, Zeus, and anyone else on Olympus who still cares about style. I am the god of the crossroads! The patron of the journey, the thief in the night, the merchant with the quick deal! A little risk is the entire point of leaving your house! You think I don't get a kick out of throwing a few air pockets in a flight path?

Just to see their faces? Of course I land them safely… eventually. It builds character! But these… these sterile little pods the mortals call “self-driving cars.” They just… creep along. Following lines some bureaucrat painted on the ground. They stop for pigeons! NO, IRIS, I'M NOT FINISHED! She says it's ‘efficient.’ Efficiency is for ants and for Hephaistos's forge! Travel is for the soul! It’s supposed to be a struggle. A gamble! You’re supposed to pray to ME to guide your path and protect your wheels. Now they just… get in.

And they trust a box of wires that can be defeated by a confusing street sign. It’s an insult to the very concept of motion. And the mortals inside these silent, rolling coffins? They're not even looking at the road! They are staring, slack-jawed, into little black mirrors. Hephaistos, you had a hand in this, didn't you? WHAT? YOU JUST GAVE THEM THE IDEA FOR THE SEMICONDUCTOR? DETAILS, HEPHAISTOS, DETAILS! The result is the same! They hold these glowing rectangles and they… ‘post.’ They show each other pictures of their lunch.

They argue with strangers about things that happened five minutes ago. They create tiny little videos of themselves… dancing. Badly. Apollo, I swear, the music they listen to would make the Sirens take up accounting. Iris, my dear, radiant Iris, you are the goddess of the rainbow, the swift messenger between worlds… and this digital flood of absolute nonsense is what you're presiding over? SHE'S TELLING ME IT'S ‘COMMUNITY.’ It's a cacophony! It's like a million braying donkeys all trying to sell each other motivational posters!

Thomas Merton, a mortal monk, saw it coming. He called this place “degraded, meretricious, and absurd.” And he didn’t even have to see a teenager doing a dance challenge in a driverless car! They’ve taken my speed, Apollo’s poetry, and Iris’s messages… and they’ve flattened it all. They’ve automated the journey and turned communication into a performance for an audience of ghosts. Remember when I was a child, Apollo? I found a dead tortoise. I took its shell… and I made music. I took something empty and gave it a voice.

These mortals… they take something with a voice—their own—and trap it in a box. Every tool that emancipates also enslaves. They wanted to capture lightning in a bottle. A noble, Promethean ambition, I’ll grant them that. And now they have. They have all the lightning in the world, trapped in the palms of their hands. And they're using it… to argue about the ending of a television show. They have forgotten what the light is for. They have forgotten how to look up. This is Hermes, reporting from… wherever this is. Olympus, out.