Someone wrote the following on a private forum I attend:
"In the future everyone will be implanted with a microchip at birth. It will include things like your IQ, your credit rating and your net worth. Also something new, called your "Gullibility Quotient". The used car salesman will know exactly who you are when you walk into the showroom."
My reply:
We fear such things because we cherish liberty as our primary means of self-preservation.
But we have increased our population immensely in a very short time, and the resulting body politic is basically a band of tumors fighting over the same blood supply.
So, as frightening as such universal identification schemes work, they are what is necessary if we are to continue being such a vast and powerful body politic.
Our bodies are totalitarian regimes in which each cell is typed for a specific job.
We wish not to be typed, we want free volition. But with so many of us living at once, accountability wants a scheme whereby we can be stamped.
This encroaching surveillance and identification is a symptom more than a cause.
Remember: one of the largest brain functions in humans is face recognition.
At some point, encroaching totalitarianism will make us individuals sufficiently uncomfortable as to demand a brain that actually cares about its body's constituent cells. We will cause it to feel our pain. Until then, our power structures will increasingly do with us as they will. Every day, they grow more powerful, using our efforts to become so. They make weapons and such that are denied to us. Imagine your body with claws that strike itself when the brain commands, injuring body parts that object to how the brains takes most of their blood sugar and oxygen.
Imagine this without neural pain feedback. The brain will bash the body to pieces if it so chooses until it destroys the body and thus itself.
This has ever been the logic of empire. We seem to be at an evolutionary impasse wherein this will no longer work.
To me, the question is: is reactionary pain feedback (rebellion, oppositional revolution, etc.) the better tactic? Or is the better tactic to build a different body with different "DNA", thereby starving the brain while creating cellular structures purposely designed to survive that brain death (collapse of empire)?
The clawed fists will not be able (barring fullblown nuclear winter and added WMD devastation) destroy all those radical cellular structures, and those that survive can network differently, coerced into doing so sanely and equitably by the extreme survival difficulties imposed by the wreckage caused by the old body.
As it stand, the populace is too easily lulled. It is not willing to send adequate pain feedback to the de facto psychopathic brain that literally has no compassion because it has no sense of feeling outside itself?
Meanwhile, since liberty is still our chief possession for self-betterment, here's an old-school howl.
"In the future everyone will be implanted with a microchip at birth. It will include things like your IQ, your credit rating and your net worth. Also something new, called your "Gullibility Quotient". The used car salesman will know exactly who you are when you walk into the showroom."
My reply:
We fear such things because we cherish liberty as our primary means of self-preservation.
But we have increased our population immensely in a very short time, and the resulting body politic is basically a band of tumors fighting over the same blood supply.
So, as frightening as such universal identification schemes work, they are what is necessary if we are to continue being such a vast and powerful body politic.
Our bodies are totalitarian regimes in which each cell is typed for a specific job.
We wish not to be typed, we want free volition. But with so many of us living at once, accountability wants a scheme whereby we can be stamped.
This encroaching surveillance and identification is a symptom more than a cause.
Remember: one of the largest brain functions in humans is face recognition.
At some point, encroaching totalitarianism will make us individuals sufficiently uncomfortable as to demand a brain that actually cares about its body's constituent cells. We will cause it to feel our pain. Until then, our power structures will increasingly do with us as they will. Every day, they grow more powerful, using our efforts to become so. They make weapons and such that are denied to us. Imagine your body with claws that strike itself when the brain commands, injuring body parts that object to how the brains takes most of their blood sugar and oxygen.
Imagine this without neural pain feedback. The brain will bash the body to pieces if it so chooses until it destroys the body and thus itself.
This has ever been the logic of empire. We seem to be at an evolutionary impasse wherein this will no longer work.
To me, the question is: is reactionary pain feedback (rebellion, oppositional revolution, etc.) the better tactic? Or is the better tactic to build a different body with different "DNA", thereby starving the brain while creating cellular structures purposely designed to survive that brain death (collapse of empire)?
The clawed fists will not be able (barring fullblown nuclear winter and added WMD devastation) destroy all those radical cellular structures, and those that survive can network differently, coerced into doing so sanely and equitably by the extreme survival difficulties imposed by the wreckage caused by the old body.
As it stand, the populace is too easily lulled. It is not willing to send adequate pain feedback to the de facto psychopathic brain that literally has no compassion because it has no sense of feeling outside itself?
Meanwhile, since liberty is still our chief possession for self-betterment, here's an old-school howl.
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