Deus ex machina is a Latin phrase meaning “god from machine.” The term was originally applied quite literally to the emergence of a god through elaborate machinery in Ancient Greek drama, which Horace discouraged the profligate use of in his Ars Poetica. Such gods were frequently used by lesser playwrights to swoop in (somewhat literally) and solve a problem or unwind an overcomplicated plot, though the estimable Euripides used such divine interventions more than any of those lesser playwrights. His laudable usage perhaps better reflects the alternative meaning of machina, a scheme (particularly of political nature), as Euripides often built up to the intervention of the god throughout the play and the divine entrance was less a solution to the plot than a part of it. Though in modern parlance the term is used primarily derisively to describe unlikely solutions to ill-constructed plots, that secondary meaning should also be considered in a broader context. Are the gods arising from our literary and literal machines merely technical solutions to a complex world/plot, or has the machine itself become the plot of life?