Atomization Variant
Atomization Variant
Declaring independence from diseased systems.
Every epoch has its advertising campaigns for the declared advancements in civilizational progress, usually crafted around technologies that proclaim to liberate humans from their own deficiencies and inadequate dispositions. New offerings promise to nurse increasingly obscure imperfections, amplified and exaggerated beyond reason for successful advertising campaigns. Each one is often a new ball and chain convincingly sold under the label of “saving time” through efficiency and expedience or as a source of safety and security from imagined threats, too often manufactured by those in power who have prepared in advance the recommended solution.
There is no public custom, social performance, digital application, novel technology, or mass surveillance gadget today with a utility that can’t be fabricated around an equally fabricated public campaign, usually manufactured chaos to stir manias that move the psychology of the passive post-modern consumer to justify the absolute necessity of the unnecessary, while believing they arrived at this position through their own cleverness. The measurement of privacy violation tolerance, the “creepy line”, is itself a manufactured public custom invented to move the masses toward surrendering any remaining notions of the concept (privacy) as one unit, having learned that individuals are more apt to accept the sacrifice within the warm confines of a mindless herd.
The steady march toward frictionless life has now accelerated beyond a point of stability, coherence, or maintenance. It’s intentionally a system for degrading human existence, designed for corralling and controlling human populations, that if nature or luck allows their continued survival, are to be permitted to do so only in the confines of an ever-decreasing set of parameters and constantly kept in a state that prohibits even the thought of altering their behavior — distracted, fearful, anxious, medicated, docile, passive, ignorant and ill — all while continuing to seek out the poisonous solutions proffered by the benefactors of this system that keep them in such a degraded state.
A revolutionary age is the age of action. In the present age, a rebellion is of all things most unthinkable. Such an expression of strength would seem ridiculous to the calculating intelligence of our times.
— Søren Kierkegaard
The Present Age (1846)
Actions, thoughts, or even thoughts of taking action will be closely monitored by corporate state authorities, who will increasingly view any independent-minded subjects as suspicious if not outright guilty for even thinking to transgress the systems built for their enslavement. Today this might include anyone using an encrypted communications device with disabled microphones and cameras, or refusing to be injected with a mysterious substance advertised as a safe and effective “vaccine”. Tomorrow it will be extended to anyone who declines to be implanted with a chip in their hand between their forefinger and thumb or refuses to transact via official markets mediated only with government-programmed digital currencies that can be shut off to shut out those who don’t obey the system.
The frictionless life and technologies provided for its prevailing acceptance have manifested only conditions of subservience to keep individuals further detached from themselves, the natural world, and other humans, and if not at constant war with the natural world then in conflict with other humans, including and especially fellow citizens with whom they ought to find a common cause but instead allow trifling affairs to keep them always at odds.1
The electromagnetic frequency fuel for a thriving frictionless society is detrimental on a biological and cellular level to the human nodes who cultivate the capital as attention labor for extraction while lending the fingers, swipes, text, voices, faces, thoughts, ideas, intentions, and passive digital performances as seamless intelligence for tuning automated systems to become more efficient at extracting and monetizing human behavior.
The advance must continue at the expense of a healthy and cohesive society and only the conscious and aware individual can “opt-out” of these systems, but at a substantial social and monetary cost they must be willing to endure beyond merely exclusion and isolation.
Dis- Latin origin meaning 1. "lack of, not"; 2. "opposite of, do the opposite of"; 3. "apart, away"
ease (n.)
c. 1200, "physical comfort, undisturbed state of the body; tranquility, peace of mind; wellbeing; opportunity.”
While connecting artifices of meaning to the senseless acts of enrapturing senses for temporary pleasures in artificial worlds, the essential connections rooted deep within our species’ programming devolve into sluggish and buggy dis-ease. Attention depletion, focal erosion, anxiety, neurosis, empathy fatigue exacerbated by narcissistic and nihilistic dehumanizing pursuits, and the impulse to stimulate other diseases tear us from each other and our natural roots. These are the preconditions seeded for decades if not at least a century of intentional policy decisions and collective social wrong turns often based on corrupted or manipulated science.2
The excess capital squeezed from these systems is accumulated upwards and centrally, giving power and control over thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs to a select few individuals, the architects of these systems, who can today program within them their desire that humanity remains as disconnected from truth, reality, each other, and nature as possible so the systems constantly expand, extract wealth, and grow ever more powerful.3
We have troubled our species by constantly measuring time so as to utilize it for the mechanistic and schematic efficiencies that we are told progress demands. Yet time cannot be saved, nor used. Only measured, obeyed, and interpreted through the varied personal experiences that occasion its passing.
The computer age portended a new technological liberation late last century. Information networks and communication technologies were celebrated for transforming the human experience through an accelerated “progress” that often demands no questions are asked or potential consequences gauged. In the face of expectant capital acquisitions, nothing can ever stand in front of a train with no conductor. As is the case with all epochs of “progress” the tracks will be laid faster than the train is capable of moving, and the quality and essence of the destination in regard to our human experience will always be ignored.
We now exist as highly inactive and slovenly creatures, influenced to simply be measurable in nanoseconds of attention extraction through self-aggrandizing performative labor. Heidegger’s standing reserve, a future of potential human nodes, distracted chimpanzee relatives for technological aggregation and dispersion.
The infamous Apple 1984 “Macintosh” commercial promised that thanks to their new invention of personal computing liberation, the year 1984 would be nothing like the fictional dystopian novel by George Orwell. If only they knew they were planting the early seeds for a world in which automation, artificial intelligence, networked communications, and data pillaging through constant and invisible surveillance of every human on the planet would set the stage for something Orwell could have never imagined.
Each epoch has its salesmen of progress who show us the way forward by constantly pointing to the past as a compass for where we are at present and why it matters: Fire, the wheel, domesticated animals, gunpowder, and the printing press. They point to the computer, the router, the servers, the handheld computers that vibrate ecstasy in our pockets and through our loins, the rattling, buzzing promise of potential human connection in the form of an emoji-filled message. Human emotion repackaged as yellow faces with emotive pixelated re-presentations powered by ones and zeros.
These centralized systems are not just digital, or in our own pockets. The most egregious are unseen, in vast warehouses like Google’s hydroelectric-powered server farm on the Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon, and Facebook’s data farm further south near Prineville or their partners of the NSA with their behemoth storage farm in the Utah desert guarded full time by military police.
Not all systems store bits and bites. The most fragile and capable of catastrophes now make bits and bites in ever-decreasing big Agra-business facilities suddenly prone to spontaneous combustion. Buying into centralized food production systems by corporate agricultural monsters, like their big pharma brethren, own and control the government agencies charged with their level brokerage has rendered humans dependent on the unthinkable. And so without giving it much thought, people appear to be okay with this and wholly unprepared for the reckoning that unpreparedness provokes.
But where does a computer fit on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? How much uncontaminated vegetable crop can the most powerful tablet or iPhone yield for a family? How much unpolluted fresh water can a pink Macbook produce? Does android have an app for heating a home? A yurt? A tent?
These are the fundamental questions that progress has conditioned us to instinctually ignore. We are accustomed to assuming it will all be regulated and thoughtfully harvested for us, and so on a long enough timeline of pavlovian conditioning through repetitive trips to our hypermarkets of abundance, now simply dropped at our doorsteps at all hours of the day, we assume it will always be there.
Dependency breeds despondency.
We have centralized and outsourced everything important to global supply chains and foreign peasants willing to work for a few dollars a day and those who do ponder anything important wonder why we’re susceptible to fragility and chaos.
We have neglected everything essential to the human experience and wonder why we no longer have the temperament or resilience to endure minimal intra-species conflict, local, national, or international, or the ability to organize meaningful resistance and rebellion that moves beyond simply attempting to maintain and survive.
The dis-eased tactics have succeeded in atrophying physical potential while accelerating the entropy of our previously competent and worthy systems of self-organizing without the guidance of states or corporations. Meanwhile, the civilizational watchmen, those entrusted with species survival and tribe security have endured endocrinological shelling and been transitioned to weakness while also being emasculated at every turn.
Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system …thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.
― Theodore Kaczynski
The active bodies that once passed their time tilling the soil, planting seeds, and nurturing nature’s bounty for survival are today idle hands and bodies that pass their time seated, crouched, twisted, and prone with blue screens glowing and black mirrors reflecting the facial expressions curated by the inauthentic direction of artificial intelligence and algorithmic predictability.
This atomization of absentminded human nodes of previous physical networks now rendered digital has disintegrated socio-cultural unity and cohesion in a way no other system has in human history. Common cultural events and shared experiences once enhanced community and a sense of belonging to something greater than oneself have been abandoned for asynchronous and disconnected atomized selective experiences, fully mediated by artificial intelligence.
The artificial has replaced the tangible and physical engagement of work. Those iron arched words in German — Arbeit Macht Frei — at the gates of Nazi labor camps were no less true than they were a cynical greeting to new prisoners. Work does set humans free. It gives life meaning and purpose while building confidence and establishing parameters for personal discipline and accomplishment. The work humans put in for individual and familial survival, at the local and intimate level devoid of the soul-sucking expectations of a global corporate machine will always render considerable meaning while providing the most potent of liberties derived from self-sustainability.
Two generations of disconnected youths are so enraptured with video presentations of people working with their hands and bodies in nature, crafting, farming, building, and surviving in the wild elements. Sheltered and coddled by safety-first parents who robbed them of the blessings of a free-range childhood, trapped by modern comforts and suffocated by their soulless digital ethereal existences constantly bombarding them with contradictory and hypocritical nihilistic post-modern edicts, the very act of cutting wood, digging in the dirt, or building a fire triggers a reaction in their hardwired evolutionary intuitions that what is happening on their screens is tangible, instinctual, and the results so worthy of human investment in time, emotion or capital, they are forced to surrender their limited attention spans to the once ordinary yet now fantastical experience unfolding on their screens: chopping wood, building a fire, cooking over a fire, building shelter, hunting, foraging, trapping, fishing.
The blessings of a life of self-reliance and independence through embracing a modicum of risk for survival from the systems that constantly weaken and degrade them beckon their deep-rooted desire for liberation from habituated daily choices they hardly comprehend yet instinctually know to have them chained to its undesirable and inhumane anodynes.
Instead of declaring independence from these systems for a satisfying life of self-determination, they will turn to other sources within the system for temporary relief from their dis-ease, including pharmacological, and no doubt in due time consistent acquisitions of self-help and self-care literature that utilize fear, psychology, and alternative dis-ease to enhance the therapeutic culture that drives individuals no closer to themselves, the natural world or humanity.
The next stage of mass accepted distractions will require headsets and hand-held motion devices to emulate reality in the world of ever-decreasing liberties so greatly disconnected from the material and tangible that the least capable of our species will shackle themselves to this new mental prison while caring not who holds the keys with plans to continue to lead our species on a blind march over the dystopian post-human rubicon.
Thankfully that rubicon has not yet been crossed and there is always the opportunity for the individual to opt-out and reject that horrific future masquerading as “progress”. Millions will make that simple choice when the spirit of liberation rises within them, having spent the vast majority of their limited time alive withering away within the confines of these dis-eased systems.
If you are capable of being a man, then danger and the harsh judgment of existence on your thoughtlessness may help you become one.
— Søren Kierkegaard
The Present Age (1846)
One day they will wake up having realized they hurriedly dashed toward every frictionless offer just like their neighbors, and in the process they all centralized away their individual liberties and merely sought to exist in a rendered immaterial shell, fragile, dependent, and despairing.
While turning to the past for solutions, the sources of liberation that flourished in ancestral generations, they will take and incorporate vast reservoirs of information at their fingertips and utilize it toward their own emancipation through the long process of psychological and corporeal healing. Individual nodes, components of a vast global technocratic machine declaring independence from its diseased systems.
And those who seek independence from that prison will venture forth into a hyper-atomized version of a new world. Forced to yield to the measured impositions of silence and its voids that furnish cushioning salvation from the incessant march toward collective madness in a world built for mental subjugation, intellectual herding, moral debasement, and physical control.
All the creatures including the solitary man that cry out for seclusion and the liberties it affirms for his soul will once again go quiet, and all that will remain are all the necessary elements stripped naked to their purest form, living undisturbed, with the bountiful provisions of nature for an atomized variant of human existence, not ideal for social creatures, but as humanely as one could desire at this inhumane time.
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