During the All-Star Game, the commercial voices of the network ring out crass but unapologetic, the bigbuck advertisers cheesy as ever. Like the used carlot hucksters of the fifties, only updated now with suitable modern snark… and then it glissades out like an auctioneer with an android voice implant, too fast for human speech decoders. Just another step in the inexorable slide to artificial intelligence, bionic life.
Luddites cry foul; but the deed is done… ever since Africa, and our fatal blindness to the rest of life. “Not like us.” So we dominate, exploit, exterminate, until we stand alone with our barren future.
Silicon fantasies shatter to pixel dust if not fed real organic food. The infamous Nacho diet only carries a nerd so far. Then I guess, if you’re a ladder climber, adrenochrome.
Kissinger comments on the dangers of AI getting outside the human decision loop, where we still choose what we deem important to consider, in our mysterious way. Joseph Farrell rebuts that Kissinger’s preferred lens is the elite decision loop, while AI threatens to revert to the entropy of the whole polis, and beyond. Tapping into the hidden power of the Democracy of Things, you might say.
Always the cosmic perspective is a threat to the globalist fixation on material power and control. Its only safe use to be kept locked in Heaven, as an ultimate reward for servitude and sacrifice. Wherever it shows up on Earth it must be crucified, unless it proves useful in seducing slaves to abandon hope for a better, more humane world.
Charles Eisenstein chips in with the usual spade thrust to the heart of the matter: it’s not about global warming or global cooling, it’s about the pervasive war on the planet that we’re carrying out on all fronts. The insatiable funneling of all environmental issues into the specter of “Global Warming” neglects the fatal war on the planet we’re actively waging. Temperature is not the only catastrophic result of the human takeover of Planet Earth; so to focus on it diverts attention from the deeper roots of the problem: how we see ourselves fitting with a thriving biotic community.
Last week I heard a young man at the lake commenting to a friend: “Yeah, I like nature and all that, but…”
There is so much of the fundamental problem showing through that half a statement. “Nature and all that” is a way of boxing everything nondigital, I suppose; everything we once called “real.”
Is global warming real? Is there really a “war on terror”—or a “war of terror” being waged against the natural world?
What is natural, anyway? And who is we?
In other news, they’ve just approved GMO babies.
Whoever they are. Certainly not we.
Humans? What about our 1–4 percent Neanderthal DNA… and a sprinkle of faery dust from “the Little People,” Homo floresiensis? If they are us… what then? Does it go all the way through the life chain? Past the cute gogglyeyed crabs I spared on my beach walk, right down to those dullards, the defenseless clams I plucked from the sand and boiled for lunch?
The People, every tribe called themselves.
Everyone else, Other: enemy. cockroach. beast. alien. piece of shit. slave. vermin. unclean. outlander. Really, and here comes the funny part, nature, and all that.
Funny because how can you have digital whatever unless you’re already hooked in by manipulations both subtle and crude, time-tested and cutting-edge, to the machine, the matrix, the bionic path. From eyeglasses, to laser surgery, to eye implants; from crutches, to prosthetics, to thought-triggered limbs; from the conscript; to the eager recruit; to the super-soldier; from the peasant, to the factory worker, to the robot agent of the master AI program running amok from its fatal premise, total knowledge and control, made by man in God’s image.
Omniscient, omnipresent… but they left out the final build, omnibenevolent.
Let’s hope the Gig Buy (oh, sorry for the glitch—Big Guy) figures that one out before we do.
Whoever we are.
