📡 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 people who share our destiny, our ideas of good and valuable are programmed into us by the faces we see and the voices we hear. We become good 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 you. Bidding is done with work owed by others, money, and is used to bid for more programming. This is a feedback loop shaped by survivorship, its cycles are similar to BSE or hookworms. It’s the survivorship of programming that compels us to give our surplus freely. Which we do, because we’re good people.
This in turn 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 a strange attractor.
As ethicists in lab coats, the social sciences are guardians of good itself, and have failed. In their business of obscured “oughts”, an “is” is largely rhetorical; moral philosophy focuses on being wise and good, and so they say good, fashionably wise things. 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, less so. A self-administered genocide, most privileged first, delivered through a disease that feeds on the values we all hold dear? That would be very bad to say, if it could even be seen.
And it can’t be seen. The modern lens of virtue ethicists is one of blank-slates and prescribed values, it rejects human biology. Through its lens of oughts, a techno-socio-economic biohazard is hazardous to something incidental, and has three different types of “is” to ignore, its evolution another 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, steeper gradients on the funnel walls. We might avoid these traps if we knew what we were, before before we decided what we ought to be, but we don’t. And with flexible values we shit directly into our own 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.