Part of our immune system is made up of white blood cells. The purpose of the immune system is clear. It fights foreign, potentially harmful particles and diseases. But if you were a white blood cell, you’d never know that. You’d probably just understand things like: if chemical A comes nearby, produce response B. To you, eating viruses would just be satiating your hunger.
We take the same myopic viewpoint towards technology. As it becomes increasingly cohesive, we typically look at things from the point of view of the white blood cell: we are the cells, and we respond from a primitive, low-level perspective. Of course, that’s relative: what we do is high-level with respect to the cells in our body. But now that technology is at a sufficient stage of cohesiveness, a new level of complexity emerges that makes us the low-level components of what we might call the “technological organism”.
And just as individual cells in our body are often sacrificed for the greater good of the body, so too are we being sacrificed for the greater good of the organism. Of course, the greater good of the technological organism contradicts the greater good of biological life, which is why the cohesive technological organism needs to be fought and restricted.
And to fight it, we need to understand the high-level intent of the organism, rather than the low-level actions of the individual constituents. For instance, the low-level intent of CEOs of megacorporations is just to gain more power and get rich. But they are just pawns for the technological organism, whose ultimate goal is only its own growth. Even CEOs are locked into their roles: their only power is to direct technological growth. And in the future, such people are likely to be discarded completely in favor of AI decision-making.
It is the same with university research positions. Ostensibly, the professor position exists to provide a safe haven for dissenting and potentially radical thought. Tenure was designed so that professors could pursue research to their hearts’ abandon without fear of losing their job due to the lack of immediate practicality of their research, or due to the prevailing political winds.
But technology always shifts and mutates human intent so that the original effect of the intent is lost. In this mutation process, human effort is redirected to benefiting technology at the expense of biological life. Going back to the position of the research professor, it is true that in most cases, they still have immunity against political and economic interests.
But, one must ask, is immunity from political interests even important now, given that technology has modified political will so that it cannot go against the growth of technology? Yes, there are still some important political issues. But the ability of human beings to change their environment through politics is dwindling given that technology is infecting all spheres of human functioning. Increasingly, politics has only one true function now: to make the lives of human beings more comfortable against the onslaught of technology, so that we continue to advance it at an optimal pace. The only difference between the left and the right is who gets more comfortable first.
Thus we must ask, what is the function of the university professor position, in high-level terms from the perspective of the technological organism? There are two functions. The most obvious is to support the technically elite so they can produce new technical components. But even more frighteningly, it is to provide a playground for the nerds so they don’t use their intellect to go against the system.
It gets worse. In the future, fewer and fewer people will be needed to advance the system due to AI and other sophisticated tools. Yet, the position of the university professor is still likely to be maintained because the most intelligent of our society need a system where they can feel that they are valued and where they can work on mostly irrelevant problems. In this way, all their energy is directed away from thinking about, and even acting on serious issues such as climate change.
For example, climate change scientists really work tirelessly to forecast the effects of climate change and even exhibit the damage it has caused. But have we done anything about it? Almost nothing. We knew about climate change for more than half a century now, and we’ve done nothing, even though something could have been done, theoretically. Yet, billions are poured into climate science. We have more than enough proof to show how horrible emitting CO2 into the atmosphere is, but what is being done? But from the system’s point of view, climate science positions are great. They give the frustrated intellectual an outlet to relieve their stress and despair. Their brains are trained well: they think, if only we could predict one more dire consequence of climate change, then…then they’ll listen! But it’s just a game where they assemble result after result, just so they feel they’re saving the planet and doing something good.
And every once and a while, some good can come out of it. Maybe a species is saved here, a forest is saved there….just to give us a carrot once and a while. And maybe morally, what climate scientists are doing is a good thing. But does that change their true purpose within the system? No. The system just wants to redirect their moral impulses. And as a bonus, the public believes that “something is being done” or that “scientists are working on it”.
There are always rebellious elements in society that will go against the system. But quickly, the system learns how to subsume those rebellious elements and turn them into tools for the system. Every day, the technological organism learns how to take those who want to do good, and turn them into instruments for technological domination. It’s the same thing with the leftists: they originally wanted equality for all people, which was a good thing. But now, the only thing their goal means is equality for all people with respect to their positions in advancing the destructive technological system. Do leftists care about everyone having equal access to wild nature? No. They only focus on getting everyone equal salaries in tech corporations. No surprise there.
Rebellion and anarchy are a good thing, and we must continue to rebel. But rebels against the system must keep in mind one thing: if the rebellion is not sufficiently harsh, then it will be like sparring in the martial arts dojo. When you study martial arts, you spar with the more experienced students and the sifu to learn. They use force against you, but not enough to really seriously harm you. They just use enough to train you.
This is what is happening with rebellion today. Mainstream environmentalists, anarchists, and other initiatives for nature are using just enough force to train the system to be an even better fighter. And what does the system fight? Us. It wants to completely subjugate us for optimal technological growth, and we are training it to do so.
So, if we hope to gain freedom from the technological organism, we must use sufficient force to subjugate it. We must be stricter and lethal. We must reject innovation and scientific discovery. The Amish aren’t perfect, but we must be like the Amish when they say “enough is enough” to a certain level of technology. They understand that technology past a certain point is not a good thing. And we have gone way past that point!
The next time the technological organism comes to the dojo, we must not spar with it. We must use our every effort to fight it, and kill it so that it can never come back.