Image by Gertruda Valasevičiōtė.
Sometime in 2008, I was having a conversation with an FBI agent. This isn’t something I would normally do, but in this case it was family, her half-brother who is 14 years older than her. We didn’t grow up together and never really liked each other. His wife and I had a strong mutual dislike for each other, but at the time I was trying to be more involved in the lives of their two young daughters and my nieces. .
We were sitting in the living room of their home in Simi Valley. Police are moving there and they don’t have to live with real people in LA. The boring chatter of a football game on TV floated softly in the background. Somehow, along the long-forgotten line of conversation, we moved on to the topic of theft and morality. My brother told me — and this is the exact quote —Are you someone who thinks it’s wrong to steal from a Mom & Pop store but Walmart is a big business so it’s okay to steal?
Feeling that it was time for me to shine, I replied: In order to believe that taking something from Walmart without paying for it is “stealing,” you must first believe that Walmart has the ability to do so. something. I don’t
He quickly became confused. he continued.
In my view, you are thinking: consciousness and intention to own something. Walmart has none of that. it’s a construct. It may feature stores and employees, managers and executives, but it is essentially a legal fiction. composite entity. Walmart really exists only on paper, and it can be said that it has some right to its own warehouses that store ugly furniture and sweatshop clothing only through social consensus and law enforcement. It’s nothing more than fear.
The “synthetic entity” part really fascinated him. He froze like an old computer. You can almost hear the wheels of his mind rattling as he tries to process ideas that are so alien to his worldview.
Thanks to certain decisions of the good old Supreme Court, these synthetic organizations have all the “rights” of individual citizens, but none of the obligations, such as death. From the CEO to the usher at the door, Walmart doesn’t have a single human servant that can’t be replaced. Like all employees of the mega-corporation, they are basically wetware, serving the needs of more or less immortal structures.
You may have figured out what I’m trying to do with this: Enterprises are a form of artificial intelligence. I hate to break this issue for you, but our society was conquered by AI generations ago.
i am calling them machine god“gods” because they are basically immaterial and are primarily conceptual, like Hermes for example. “Machine” because there is no real thing. intention again Consciousness-what they have programmingthey take objects and convert them into money, which is essentially the same thing as saying that they convert objects into power. the object itself life—Trees, livestock, landscapes, sweatshop workers— death.
A fun, archaic occult term for such beings is: egregore.
Taking things out of a mom-and-pop store directly harms the lives of flesh-and-blood humans of will and consciousness. Not at all for Walmart, Target and Dollar General. These companies generate billions of dollars in profits, most of which already goes into the pockets of a handful of executives. If I could do so with impunity, I would get everything I wanted or needed from Walmart and other chains without paying a penny.
Just like what the European invaders did to Turtle Island.
It is not a moral standpoint that I do not shoplift, but a realistic standpoint of fear of legal punishment. Also, my finances are sound enough that need To receive an object from a mechanical god without paying for it. Unlike many people in this country, I can afford the basics of life. There is no good reason for me to risk theft. But if my circumstances were to change, I wouldn’t feel any guilt over what happened at Walmart.
So my brother’s attempt to trap me with a simple, pseudo-Christian moral conundrum failed utterly. After several minutes of wearing the police mind trying to find an angle to subvert my claim, he finally got to this one. So where does the transition between Mom & Pop stores and Walmart happen?
I thought he really gave it to me, which is clearly irrational. If we can buy shares in companies on the stock market, we’re pretty close to the realm of the mechanical gods. Technically, they’re both businesses, but there’s a huge disconnect between my local corner store and Walmart. It’s like comparing marble to Jupiter.
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I would argue that states tend not only to reproduce themselves, but also to manufacture humans who need them, a form of artificial intelligence.
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Since the Industrial Revolution, at least since the advent of advertising and PR firms, every flashy new technology has had its true followers. In other words, people who can’t wait to see how much better their lives will be. The fable is still popular two centuries after it was revealed to be a lie. The most important outcome of most new technologies is killing more of the planet, impoverishing the working class, and increasing wealth and control.
Anyone involved in the last smoldering remnants of the counterculture in the mid-90s may remember everyone believing that the internet would liberate democracy and more. Anyone who studied Marx for his two seconds could have easily predicted that the ability to buy just about anything online would put many mom friends out of business. But could they have predicted QAnon? Hmmm…
Some of cybertech’s early dickriders, like Douglas Rushkoff, have repented of their stupid technophilia… now it’s too late. Who knows what kind of world we would live in today if liberals and leftists instantly recognized that the internet was a force of evil. As a matter of fact, never mind. They probably couldn’t stop it. At that point, the beast was coming whether we wanted it or not.
But I don’t believe our technodystopia has historically been that way. Inevitable.
Back in May, author Thomas Knapp made a statement in his Counterpunch article that he thought was worth quoting at length before cutting with Wu-Tang’s sword.
“For at least 3.3 million years, we’ve been rushing toward a “singularity” since our hominin ancestors (probably Australopithecus or Kenianthropus) began using tools to make our work easier. rice field.
Over millions of years, we’ve continually improved our tools…and our tools have continually improved us. We are not exactly the same animals we were before cars, let alone behind the wheel. We can do things our grandparents and humanity never dreamed possible.
If we start building tools that can crack nuts better than we can, talk farther than we can, and move faster than we can, we’ll end up building tools that can think better than we can. was inevitable. “
With the utmost respect for those who insulted their entire race, I have to say that this is the dumbest gold medal contender I’ve heard this year. I prefer wholesome sarcasm, but damn. This kind of original sin nonsense irritates me.
First of all, the industrial base that made computer technology possible is only a few centuries old. Fire up your calculator and divide 200 by 3.3 million to see what the ratio is. The speed of such a journey can only be described as ‘intense’. To me, it’s like being healthy for 100 years and then dying of cancer all over your body for a split second.
Secondly, AI, the Internet, computers, industry, and even civilization weren’t “inevitable” at all. Civilization is only 5,000 years old (which he divides by 3.3 million to get a larger number, but not by much), and James C. Scott observes that increase. Against the Grain, the early hierarchical states were very fragile for a variety of reasons. There was no guarantee that this way of organizing society would last as long as it has…and probably won’t.
The Industrial Revolution was not an inevitable consequence of humans being “users of tools.” many Where other species made and used tools, it was a specific product of a specific culture in a specific region, under specific circumstances. What if space criminal Christopher Columbus met his rightful end by drowning in the ocean before reaching Turtle Island, or, as in a short story I’m currently writing, by a coalition of time-traveling homosexuals? If he was murdered, it is highly likely that the Industrial Revolution had taken place. never would have happened. That means no capitalism, no planet-eating corporations, no fucking AI.
Third, Knapp’s passage is really just a reconstruction of Progress™’s European “enlightenment” myth. The idea that factories and skynets are part of humanity’s “natural evolution” is not only ludicrous, it is also a secret form of diet white supremacy — if the Industrial Revolution is a natural part of “our” evolution. If the Europeans were the first to do it, they would clearly be “ahead” of the others. Thus revealing some kind of destiny and so on.
Committing what is actually a colossal debacle and claiming it is “natural” for the species is a staggering level of arrogance… arrogance that is fundamental to the white social fabric. . All my life I’ve put up with this crypto racism bullshit in one form or another, and I’m sick of it. I feel about the “progress” myth the same way I feel about the Bering Strait theory and the White Jesus. I keep hoping it will be covered up in the Land of the Untruthed, but it never will. I can’t get rid of it, so my only option for mental well-being is to clown it relentlessly.
Over the past few months, there have been many gnashing of teeth about the dangers of AI. Most of these people, who have been eager to give all their personal data to tech companies for the past two decades, do not understand the relationship between AI and its dangers. This he is two things, never mind it.
does not appear to be new Danger from AI not native to our cybernetic dystopia. Trite and soulless popular culture? I already know that. Has anyone relied on computers to do their thinking? It’s been commonplace for years. Will machines take people’s jobs or kill them? check. Planetary death? Well, we’re on our way. “Singularity” is just a secular repackage of Judgment Day. It’s all hype.
Having said that, is it possible to resist?
i believe in resistance everytime It’s possible… but only if you understand the threat. Over the years, I have studied many social movements, especially the more radical movements such as workers’ rights, religious rebellions, anarchist rebellions, black power, and indigenous sovereignty. One thing all these movements have in common is that they evolved from social movements.The world where there was still such a thing community.
Many of the Black Panthers organized with neighbors whose families had been in contact for two, three, or even more generations. When was the last time you were in a neighborhood where everyone knew each other for such a long time? Gentrification is a hell of a drug.
The gospel of Marxism and anarchism was spread in cafes. These days, when I start a conversation with a stranger in a cafe, I immediately start crying. Most people prefer to interact with the screen.
The current state of extreme alienation and total cybernetic mediation is effectively destroying our communal relations. Someone like Malcolm X or Fred Hampton couldn’t have emerged from the world of smartphones and Zuckerbooks. The problem is technology, and it has been for a long time… yet people are behaving as if uncensored access to Twitter is the key to a working democracy.
what to do?
don’t know. But if you want to play Luddite with me, I have an extra sledgehammer.
