if there were any noteworthy difference between ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’, it would be defined like this: an artificial thing is a natural thing produced by a natural thing (animal) that causes the act of creation of a natural thing, something that nature wouldn’t have caused without it (the animal) being an intermediary agent in that act of creation.
glass is natural. a pepsi bottle is natural. a pepsi factory worker is natural. the factory workers production of the bottle is natural. but we call it ‘artificial’ because the bottle didn’t grow out of the ground by itself. starving to death is natural. social security is natural. people who pass it into law and people who use it are natural. but we call it artificial because the program didn’t materialize out of thin air. natural people had to make it, but that doesn’t make it unnatural. artifical does not mean ‘unnatural’.
this distinction is almost as uninteresting as it is simple and not much more can be said about it.
but what you do is point at an environment in which things and processes are present that you don’t approve of, and call those aspects of it ‘artificial’, as if they are violently against nature.
omg women’s liberation is unnatural.
omg socialism is unnatural.
omg the iphone is unnatural.
omg flock of seagulls is unnatural ('cause they run so far away? i dunno)
omg interracial breeding is unnatural.
omg those breasts are unnatural.
and all this is terrible, terrible, terrible because history is on a trajectory of desperate degeneracy. no. you gotta remember, the bulk of society will always be, must always be, mediocre, so that exceptions like me have room to play and make fArt out of the world and the people in it. and to think you’d like to deprive me of that right. unbelievable.