One of the parallel processes at work in modern times is the shift away from the abstract, mystical and visionary and toward the detailed structure of things. Computers and animals are becoming more important, even more loved and respected, while human beings, governments and corporations have lost value. Artificial intelligence has literally become a joke. Making intelligences that reason at a higher level makes no sense if the future belongs to beings that reason on a lower level.
"Corporations are people, friend."
"I think it's dangerous ... this class warfare."
That's what Mitt Romney said, and he's right.
In
1833, Parliament abolished slavery throughout the British Empire and
paid slaveowners 20 million pounds for the lost property. The United
States failed to reach a similar compromise and instead - after a
generation of threats and negotiations - slaveowners got to eat lead
balls. The 14th amendment allowed the freed slaves to become citizens,
but it also became the basis for corporate personhood.
Class warfare is dangerous. It's dangerous to the
class on top. And when you are on top and you don't see the winds of
change coming and take action to preserve yourself, history will not
judge you kindly. It doesn't matter whether you are a role model and a
job creator and a success story. It doesn't matter whether you are just
trying to hold onto your just reward for a lifetime of hard work and
good decisions. It really doesn't matter, because future generations
will just see that you stood there and ate a lead ball instead of
getting out while the getting was good.
In the final years of the second millenium,
the first fully self-regulating banking system was created and put in
charge of Wall Street. This was a system built from machines, not
people, and it made bankers just as obsolete as slaves, skilled
craftsmen and actors in an age of trucks, automated factories, and digital clones.
Human labor now has no more value than the oscillations of a sewing
machine - not even "mental labor" in the sense that we say a banker or
manager does mental work.
So this is class warfare between classes of people
who have no value to one another as commodities. A war of utterly
alienated cyphers. Zero vs. zero.
It is not a
slave revolt because the slaves are already as free as their minds will
let them be. It is in fact the masters who are on strike. They are on
strike against regulations, against social programs that only benefit
people who work for a living, against taxes, against tax CUTS when those
tax cuts require them to exercise the little gray cells (like payroll
tax cuts.) The masters have gone on strike against all of the bogeymen
that oppress them in their own deluded imaginations, harrying them as
they drive in circles around their gated communities.
Occupy _____ is not a strike. It's the strike
breakers. They don't know and they don't really care about the issues
that the oligarchs are upset about. Plutonomy? free markets? sounds like
some hippie BS to me. Up against the wall!
- ... collectives with a shared consciousness
- ... people entitled to equal protection under the law
- ... discriminated against by oppressive governments
- ... citizens of the world with no loyalty to any one nation
- ... conscientious objectors who reject all state coercion
- ... rising up in revolt against the Establishment
... and totally on the wrong side of history.
Let's take Temple Grandin's hierarchy:
- big picture normal humans
- detail oriented autistic people
- animals
And add a few other types of intelligence to the great chain of being:
- mystical visions
- corporations, collectives, governments
- normal humans
- bureaucrats and engineers
- autistic people
- animals
- computers, ecosystems
- appliances, vehicles, plants, germs
- genes, ideologies
- chemicals, simple machines
- physical structure of the universe
One
of the parallel processes at work in modern times is the shift away
from the abstract, mystical and visionary and toward the detailed
structure of things. Computers and animals are becoming more important,
even more loved and respected, while human beings, governments and
corporations have lost value. Artificial intelligence has literally
become a joke. I'm not a robot, I'm a unicorn. Making intelligences that
reason at a higher level makes no sense if the future belongs to beings
that reason on a lower level.
If Peter Ward is right, we are living in
the middle of the age of complex, multicellular life, which began 600
million years ago, and will end some time in the next 600 million years.
For billions of years before this age began, the microbes ruled. And
after complex, multicellular life eventually self-destructs, the
microbes will rule again for billions of years.
Perhaps we are also living in the middle of the age
of complex, social intelligence. Perhaps culture and civilization are
working against themselves, destined to self-destruct and return us (or
return without us) to a world ruled over by animal-like intelligences.
Even if that is not our destiny, the current trend is not toward a more
transcendent and humanized future, but a more animalistic, mechanized,
and ideological one.
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