Right or left, Red or blue,
All for me, None for you.
For the thousandth time, it dawned on me that what’s killing us is the lack of awe. All those expensive fantasies about people as machines, all that excitement over “hacking” nature instead of working with her respectfully—which is kind of like excitement over being able to rape efficiently instead of having to waste time on courting—these are the symptoms of an ailment of the heart. And the most important thing right now is to wake up the heart. That’s all I know.
Today’s strange alienation from the physical world—and from the principle of evidence-based science—did not come out of the blue sky. It’s an expression of an increasingly dysfunctional escapist fantasy that our civilization has been pursuing for a while. If we don’t watch out, today’s absurdity could become a prelude to a total collapse of physical and emotional integrity for many people. Logical, yes—but also entirely unnecessary since we CAN say no to this.
Remember how at boarding schools for indigenous children in Africa and here in the Americas, teachers force-washed the children’s mouths with soap if the children were caught speaking the language of their parents? Disgusting child abuse—another tragedy that should have never happened to any child—but also, a symbol of using “hygiene” to eradicate the alive and the uncontrollable.
See, the Great Reset seems to be a high-tech version of the Manifest Destiny, and whereas the Manifest Destiny was a theological concept that justified the diminishment of the indigenous, banning their spiritual expression, and taking their land and enslaving them (of course)—based on the fact that they were of a “wrong” religion, wink, wink—the Great Reset is a concept explaining away the need for theological, physical, and economic rule of tech billionaires, who now want to manage all life on earth—and a resulting diminishment of everybody else. They, too, have a “better” new religion—the religion of transhumanism. As such, transhumanism is both laughable and impossible—and Ray Kurtzweil, the father of singularity, will surely die when his time is due—but unfortunately for all of us, the ultimate impossibility of transhumanism is not preventing the influential crazies from attempting it, at our expense.
Beware of tech billionaires bearing gifts of efficient management…
(What’s happening above, to the best of my understanding, is that the mouse was used as a host or a living “cell factory” for printing a human ear shape, as proof of concept. The article is linked in the image and also included in the references at the end.) [See "Vicanti mouse". ~ Ed.]
Here is the rough economic model that we are being ushered toward:
The government (a human government for now, and later probably an AI government, which is entirely in the pocket of the few billionaires who paid for the algorithm) generates currency at will.
Production of most things is extremely high tech and dependent on patented technology and genes, and thus it is run by only a few people who own the patents for tech and bioforms.
They receive grants from the government and funding through various public private partnership programs to fund their production because they “benefit the people”.
The people, with the exception of a highly qualified minority, are useless in terms of production or generating an income they can use to buy products. However, they have value as bodies that are a ripe market for “improvement”. For example, if they are sick, then under various programs, paid for by the government (with vast possibilities for insurance schemes), they can receive “treatment” via maybe not so much regular medicine—since that is on its way out—but through gene therapy and digital behavioral modification tools.
Their value is in providing an excuse for the few owners of everything to use government money. This, their nature-given health is not great for the economy, as it’s their “defects” that fuel a thriving “economy” (economy interpreted as a flow of “money”).
On top of that, the stock market /commodity gambling pyramid hasn’t gone anywhere, and just like water is now traded as a commodity, citizens’ physical properties and social contracts can also be virtually traded for their market value, perhaps bundled together like packages of debt.
Indeed, the super wealthy have been doing something similar for centuries—without tech—but this latest model brings in very powerful technology and requires a bleak world for everyone, filled with destroyed nature and sick people. Joyless bleakness is its economic backbone and driving force.
To make it worse (or maybe better), it is still a bubble that will inevitably collapse because no ecosystem can tolerate being stretched and abused infinitely, so even going along with this insanity will not prevent a civilizational collapse, it will only extend the reign of the soulless bastards.
Now, we don’t really need to worry about AI directly enslaving us—or about people merging with machines in any kind of meaningful fashion—but the human beings owning all this technology are very much about enslaving us with the help of robots, and they are licking their lips as I am typing this.
To prevent this joyless hell and to stand up to billionaire abuse, we need to remember that being human is good and pleasant without any gimmicks, that joy is our natural state, and that no one needs efficiency at the price of freedom and happiness.
It may sound trivial but internalizing it is not trivial at all. To be fair, no one needed efficiency at the cost of humanity previously, either, but we are here and now, and now is a good time as any to come alive, especially given that the stakes are high.
In fact, the stakes are more than high, since the danger of new digital slavery is real. Today’s “biosecurity emergency” is a cruel, confusing backdrop for a societal transformation toward a global Conveyor of Smart Things and Disintegrated Bodies, and just because it’s not yet obvious to all, it doesn’t mean that this is not going on at a full speed.
According to the billionaires, many of us are about to become “useless people” due to the power of robotics in production—useless people but useful assets—all neatly organized and managed by the new slave owners. To stop them, we need to remember how to be fully human again, not sad mechanical robots who can be taken apart and monetized on a per-function basis.
We are of spirit and water (in the words of the Dagara elder Malidoma Some)—each of us completely unique and magical—and we are not and have never been a sum of functions, processes, and services.
People are not machines.
And right now, we need to fight for our right to be non-mechanical like our life depends on it, because it does.
It really does, and this is not a drill.
Allow me a tangent. A few years ago, I did a facetious project called “thank you for your sex.” It was an art project intended for the peaceful times, and my idea was to make fun of the consumerist media propaganda that reduced whole people to functions and “services” they could provide to others, where the function (the sexual function in this case) was alienated from the wholeness of a person and “traded” via dating websites, ultimately benefiting tech companies and their IPO’s. Back then, I still didn’t quite understand what was going on, I just felt like something’s off and commented on the social behavioral trend. But that’s exactly it! The commercial idea is to alienate the inalienable from a person and then monetize or trade it, siphoning the monetary value elsewhere!
It’s similar to that “Blue Ocean Strategy” concept of inventing a virgin market… Like seriously, no one sane and healthy has ever asked to insert a robot into their body to replace a natural function, but here we go, the bastards are inventing a mass market for what could be at most a tiny niche market consisting people with serious health issues. (But wait, they also wouldn’t mind for more people to be genuinely sick so that their market naturally expands!)
Right now, the new craze among the tech and biotech billionaires is the idea that they can engineer life (including people) from scratch. Nice custom slaves! They think that they can surveil and gene-edit their way into playing God. Their belief is stupid but unfortunately, stupidity of an idea has rarely prevented anyone from trying to implement it—and let’s not forget that to them we are cattle.
Let me do an artistic explanation of monetized biohacking.
Imagine that you are a not a monolith of “me” but a collection of magical entities: molecules that have their own language, cells that have their own language, communities of cells, various processes, microbes, different emotions that you generate and pick up from the air, things that connect you with invisible threads to other people and to the world around you. All of this is amazing. It’s a dance of cosmic complexity, a dance that no one really understands because aliveness cannot be quantified. Scientists of today know enough to draw models and to do various manipulations but they don’t really understand how the whole alive mystery functions because aliveness lives in a different dimension than their laboratory or their limited brains.
Now imagine that all these processes that are a part of your body and personality are intended to work in a mysteriously harmonious way with what you feel as “you,” and that the joy that you feel is a sign that everything is working in harmony.
Now, in an opposite approach, the self-appointed managers of everything on earth want to alienate you from your vital processes, isolate them from your wholeness, steal the magical soul out of them (and out of you because they are a part of who you are), and insert their robomanagers into each part of your magic, so that you are no longer you but a mechanical zombie, like a suffering puppet. They want to “disrupt” your very biology, and instead of doing justice to your natural body and preventing disease by stopping to f*ck with nature (too much to ask, I know), they want to “adapt” your genes to their altered and polluted world (like they “adapt” GMO corn to pesticides). God forbid they stop polluting! And most importantly, they want to actually own all life on Earth via the Internet of Bodies (the “body as a technology platform” concept). It’s a meant-to-fail religious reform in plain sight, veiled by lofty tech talk.
This is not good at all! They are not qualified to manage life, they have no idea about aliveness, and their religion is a toxic matter.
It’s a horrible idea.
What they are attempting is replacing aliveness with a robot. Again, it’s a horrible idea, it defies the purpose of being human, and I personally don’t have the obligation to accept this kind of existential abuse—and abuse is what it is. An ordinary conspiracy.
My gentle friend, if you are still relying on clean and rational explanations and thinking that nothing dark is going on, open your eyes, please! We need you. You are not a robot.
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Links and References
A must-hear conversation between Alison McDowell and Sayer Ji (thank you for the incredibly useful research, this is how I found out about the in vivo printing!)
Science
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/2020-top-10-emerging-technologies/
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/scientific-discovery-must-be-redefined-quantum-and-ai-can-help
Internet of Bodies
https://www.rand.org/blog/articles/2020/10/the-internet-of-bodies-will-change-everything-for-better-or-worse.html
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3226.html
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/internet-of-bodies-covid19-recovery-governance-health-data/
www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_IoB_briefing_paper_2020.pdf
Gene Editing, Bioprinting, and Living Cells as Monetized Factories
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/dec/04/china-gene-edited-baby-experiment-may-have-created-unintended-mutations
https://www.newsweek.com/he-jiankui-crispr-gene-editing-babies-1475252
https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/8-ways-crisprcas9-can-change-world
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/08/crispr-gene-testing-editing-covid19-coronavirus-diagnostics-precision-medicine-healthcare/
https://phys.org/news/2020-09-method-precise-gene.html
https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2020/05/gmo-tomato-as-edible-covid-vaccine-mexican-scientists-work-to-make-it-a-reality/
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/23/eaba7406
https://singularityhub.com/2020/06/09/scientists-3d-printed-ears-inside-living-mice-using-light-heres-how-and-why/
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2020/06/22/bioprinting-human-ears-inside-living-mice-all-without-a-single-surgical-cut/
Behavioral Modification
https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/how-to-fight-covid-with-digital-vaccines
Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny
https://originalfreenations.com/
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/dominationcode
https://lakotalaw.org/resources/revoke-the-doctrine
Singularity
https://money.cnn.com/2015/06/03/technology/ray-kurzweil-predictions/index.html?fbclid=IwAR3S16mCny0imsoBlcXn3vn50jN1nXwq3iunn2-WXljqGeVUoLwJoaZ4C6k
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/nanobots-will-live-in-our-brains-in-the-2030s-says-google-boss-1.3259597
Efficiency
https://tessafightsrobots.com/tessa-lena/mystery-raping-culture/
https://tessafightsrobots.com/tessa-lena/love-automation-creepy-mechanical-mother/
Hope
https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/prepare-for-hard-times-rebuild-yourself-be-stewards-turtle-lodge-s-CBn3KUDA7UyrcZQFwhvRHQ
Malidoma Some
Title photo: John Noonan | Unsplash
Author
Tessa Lena is a strongly opinionated musician living in New York. She is a classically trained pianist and singer, born and raised in Moscow. As a teenager, Tessa had the honor of performing her own composition at the Moscow Conservatory, and wanted to be a geneticist. As her interests expanded to Tibetan music and language, she headed to Lhasa with a backpack to do a field study in linguistics and enthomusicology.
After being attacked by a sex trafficker in Southern China and successfully fighting him off, Tessa settled in Chicago. In Chicago, she started a band working with her hero Ian McDonald of King Crimson and Foreigner, and drummer Alan Lake, who has played and recorded with Madonna, Brian Ferry, Julian Lennon, Ministry, Brian Wilson and Sam Moore from Sam And Dave. After a few years in Chicago, Tessa moved to New York and started a new band, Tessa Makes Love, along with occasional collaborations by Ian McDonald.
In 2013, her music video “Spente Le Stelle” received over a million very useful views on YouTube although the jury is still out on how many people realized that the video was a satire. Alas, the world keeps spinning, and it is still imperfect! In 2016, Tessa started Coalition for Artistic Dignity and organized a conference in Brooklyn dedicated to artistic dignity, social power and corporate responsibility. In early 2017, she released an album titled ‘Tessa Fights Robots,’ you can listen and buy it here.
Since the English language only has so many words, this blog is also called ‘Tessa Fights Robots.’Both the album and the blog are about being human in the world of technology, big data, and machine-like people.
See Tessa's website for her music and her Substack for more of her writing.
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