📡 A view from above
Human behaviour is synchronised by radiation produced at signalling hubs, controlled through a surplus bidding system. Local machines receive these signals and generate lights and sounds, which condition the nervous system for production rather than fertility.
Humans are good people, they’re just wired that way. Whatever the culture, time or place, they will be good. But human values are dynamic, socially constructed and programmed through experience. Surrounded by those who share our destiny, our values are input through the smiles and scorn of our peers.
This is our nature, our good.
After the invention of mass media, the voices you hear aren’t your people’s. They don’t come from faces that share your destiny. Broadcast from afar, their good is what’s good for the highest bidder, not for you. Bidding with work owed by others – money – we gather more production and bid for yet more programming, and the cost has stabilized at 3% of our energy budget. Like all loops piped anus to mouth, it’s prone to parasites. Acceptance is honed into compulsion through belts of riches and files of bankruptcies, in an ebb and flow that builds memetics as complex as prions or hookworms, and makes us give our surplus freely.
Which we do, because we’re good people.
It’s our goodness that nourishes the programming parasite, feeding the segmentation of people into cohorts, and of society, and of families, and of people from their values.
This isn’t about powerful humans selling trinkets to steal the labour of others. That is of course the means, but the ends are a runaway corruption of good itself. Those with the most fat steer the hunger, they set the table, defecate on it and then devour themselves. Across every major city in every country, the system consumes the richest first. Trapping, isolating and redirecting labour from the families and societies they no longer have, turning all into a thirst for more goods. This is not a human system, it’s a system of humans. An ant mill of human brains, a vortex of value extraction, converting all desire for good into desire to extract more value. Our values, and value, strip mined by this strange attractor.
As ethicists in lab coats, the social sciences are guardians of good, but have failed. In their business of obscured “oughts”, an “is” is largely rhetorical; moral philosophies focus on the wisdom and good of the time, and so good, fashionably wise things meet least resistance. Today it’s a good thing to say that wealth frees women from the burden of motherhood. To say it removes their humanity, or makes them free to toil for others? Far less so. A self-administered genocide, most privileged first, a symptom of a disease in our most sacred of values? That would be terrible to say, if it could even be seen.
And it can’t be seen. Our modern lens of virtue ethics is one of blank-slates and prescribed values, it rejects human biology. Through a lens of oughts, a techno-socio-economic biohazard is hazardous to something incidental, has three different types of “is” to ignore, and yet more evolutions to deny.
The future before us is not a path, it’s a network. A vast web of dynamic systems that grows denser and more complex each day. Markets, politics, cultures and technologies, words, behaviours and ideas - all systems of human animals, and all with their own strange attractors. AI presents opportunities for endless variations of human ant mills to emerge, with ever steeper gradients on the funnel walls. We might avoid these traps if we knew what we were, but we are too busy deciding what we ought to be. With flexible values we shit directly into our mouths at an ever increasing pace.
This isn’t just consumption consuming our good, it’s an entire class of trap that we seem blind to. We could really use an elevated position. Maybe a view from above?