On Mythology

Grant McCracken has one of those tossed-off ideas that seem profound at first glance:

Firefox and Fire Eagle sound a little like mythical creatures, the sort of thing we might hear about from the mythic worlds of North American aboriginals, classical Greece, or ancient Scandinavia. And this works too. Natural creatures with supernatural powers, this makes sense. Ordinary creatures with extraordinary powers. Mythic creatures that make periodic appearances in the human world.

...

Maybe this is why a mythological naming appeals to us. It is a little as if we have been returned to a mythical world, or a human world shot through with mythical interventions. As our world is turned upside down by the new technologies, it does begin to feel like a place occupied by creatures capricious and unpredictable, spectacular but often unintelligible, sometimes intervening on our behalf but just as often unkind to our kind. If we were to put a face to the digital revolution, maybe this it: hybrid creatures with fantastic powers engaging in spectacular interventions in the human world, but rarely possessed of anything more than a casual interest in human welfare.

Of course this falls apart when you expand the corpus a little bit. But I think there is something there -- at least, something that could be worked into literary form. Perhaps in a novel about the persistence of folklore and myths, say.