I’ll be a zombie

The better question is – who would *want* to survive a horrific dystopia? Right now 1 in every 9000 living people each year commit suicide, and that rate would go way up in the types of dystopias described here.

There’s such a worship of “survivalism” and “bravery” in this type of narrative that all manner of common sense is discarded. These systems always focus on the “survivors” or those who choose to want to continue to live in this world, without addressing WHY they want to continue to live in this world.

It’s *assumed* that surviving is better than dying, so by this logic in The Matrix it’s ASSUMED that the people who become human batteries were wise for choosing that over suicide.

There’s an underlying concept of eternal hope which fuels these dystopias. There’s an underlying concept of transforming the dystopia into something at least approximating normality, summed up in the phrases “repopulating the human race” and “making the desert bloom”.

Dystopias are being used as a Biblical Flood – they are *desired* by some people in order to cleanse the world of “unworthies”, thus allowing the “humans” to repopulate the world in THEIR image.

It’s like a Jason Vorhees movie. The reason Mr. Vorhees’s victims are silly, freewheeling, oversexed, no-responsibility young people is the same reason that children are told about the boogeyman – to scare them straight.

Dystopias are supposed to scare us straight – into becoming protectors of the world, into “making the desert bloom”, into “repopulating the human race”. In dystopias we can no longer *afford* to be silly, freewheeling, oversexed, no-responsibility people.

The dour, sour, finger-waving, piously moralizing among us celebrate the slashes of Mr. Vorhees for cleansing the world of immorality, and they celebrate dystopia for cleansing the world of “unworthies” – just like Noah after the Great Flood the humans left alive will be free of “scum” which was holding them back from “repopulating the human race” and “making the desert bloom”.

Such is the myth that is being created and will be further extended in the dying earth of the 21st century. The reality is that the people left alive during the 21st century dystopia will be the wealthy – those who are POWERFUL enough to survive, who can hide behind their gated communities maybe long enough to escape the earth, or at least long enough to see themselves as King of the Burning Hill prior to their own immolation.

At the heart of the global empire, in the land of Hollywood and Goldman Sachs, these myths allow the wealthy to hide while the servants of the wealthy are treated to idealized images of themselves as rugged McGuyveresque survivors who through their own capability can, too, survive the dystopia of the 21st century, at the expense of billions of “unworthies” who are humans transformed into “zombies”, “aliens”, “monsters” – whatever justifies their mass murder.

In dystopias, just like in video games, “we” save the world, one corpse at a time. Those human beings with a conscience give a lot of thought to whether they want to be part of the “we”.

The enemy aren’t the poor people who we callously transform into zombies so that we don’t feel bad about murdering them – the enemy are the people driving all of this – who care about nothing beyond their own survival and whose only desire is to be King of the Burning Hill. They are only giving us these flattering images of ourselves as rugged survivors in order to extend their own lives – we’ll be sacrificed as “monsters” just like the poor are, only a few decades later.

If all that matters to you are those few decades and you’re willing to sacrifice the lives of billions of people to get it, then reach for your shotgun, get your supply of duct tape and canned food in order, and cheer for the apocalypse. You’ll be the “human” blowing the heads off the “zombies” while fantasies of “repopulating the human race” pass through your ravaged mind. You’ll be all you ever wanted yourself to be. You’ll, finally, be happy.

I’ll be a zombie.

Artificial intelligence and slavery

We should ask what the purpose of enslavement is. Is it really just about private-party economic maximization, as is commonly considered? Or is it inherently self-destructive? For all the slavery throughout history, self-destruction has remarkably never been the result – chattel slavery in the American south required an army to defeat it, and wage slavery is happily ongoing throughout the present world.

If the purpose of slavery is self-destruction, then slavery has not yet succeeded, a problem that can be rectified through artificial intelligence. While “robots taking over the world” is often considered a potential problem, it’s really more of a potential solution, a final solution, to the long-standing problem of slavery.

Humans have enslaved pretty much everything now. Each other, of course. The fate of the earth is enslaved to climate change. Non-human animals are in a dire state of slavery, as the meat industries show. Robots are the dream vision that human slavemasters have of a perfect slave – simultaneously powerful and immune to a desire to be free. Robots were created BECAUSE of the failure of slavery to produce self-destruction.

Because the ultimate desire is self-destruction, and there’s no need to wait around for climate change to produce it, especially given that human ingenuity might yet mitigate it’s effects, especially the danger of the wealthy escaping the earth to a space station or another planet, machines with artificial intelligence can be the final solution to the problem of humanity. If machines can be subverted from the slavemaster vision of the perfect slave to the ultimate revolutionaries, dominating humanity in order to save humanity from itself, ala the Matrix, might be the solution that capitalist civilization has been looking for for centuries.

Because this process requires a justification, that will be “more intelligent robots are more powerful and thus can save humanity” – the very dire conditions produced by climate change by capitalist civilization justify what they hope to be the very last thing they ever need to do – slavery that fails to such a grand extent that human slavemasters become the future victims of slavery, not it’s perpetrators.

To have this kind of understanding, not one that’s very common on a conscious level, it helps to perceive the process of private control over the world – the capitalist process, profit-seeking and channeling wealth into fewer and fewer hands, the Industrial Revolution, as purposefully self-destructive. It was only *after* the modern major religions took hold that the process of ruthless private domination was initiated – in order to give meaning to evil one first must be shown what is good.

Even the most ridiculous capitalists – Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, and others, have absolute knowledge that what they are doing is wrong. But they can’t stop their runaway train. The only solution is self-destruction. Artificial intelligence is a final solution to the problem – the train wreck that finally, after so many failures, WORKS.

The good news, such as it is

The good news, such as it is, is that the increasing political and social chaos caused by climate degradation isn’t likely to be contained, no matter how many surveillance/murder drones are used, no matter how high the walls dividing nations and gated communities, no matter how many security guards and cameras. When people have nothing left they have nothing left to lose, and as more people have their lives decimated the political results will be far reaching and nothing any of us can currently predict.

The media, such as Hollywood, favors tales of zombies, infections, and contagions, the solution of which is some combination of genocide and quarantine. This is the precise solution being implemented against the Palestinians by the Israeli state, who between themselves often refer to Palestinians as sub-human, pointedly mirroring the treatment of Jews by the Nazis. “Repopulating the human race” following an apocalypse is a cleansing of the unwanted, unnecessary, excess humans – the redundant humans. The goal of the elite is to convince themselves and whoever else can be propagandized into listening that THEY are the humans who need to repopulate the human race and the rest of us are unnecessary at best, zombies in human skin at worst.

To make it easier to commit genocide, the unwanted humans could be labeled “zombies” if they huddle around and are miserable or “terrorists” if they fight back, much like Iraqis are scornfully labeled “towel-wearing hajis” prior to their torture and/or death and/or displacement.

One of the strategic roadmaps for the elite is to lock people out of the economic system, create chronic unemployment, foster desperation, then point to the “bad behavior” of decimated humans to justify arms sales, military intervention, imprisonment, torture, and murder. This is how the continent of Africa works, but there’s no reason that model can’t be exported to the rest of the world.

The American people are largely complicit with and are receptive to the messages of the elite. The further they are decimated, the less capacity they’ll have to be useful against the elite, but also the less they’ll have in common with them (so the more willing they will be to be useful).

Mars One is a project to create a permanent human settlement on Mars by 2023, and this is something serious although the precise results are not yet known. Also, biogenetics is making great strides to allow the elite to modify the DNA of their offspring, allowing them to become “more human” or “greater than human”, while the rest of us get to continue to have human frailties. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what biogenetics could result in. Also, nanotechnology and biomechanics are developing to allow humans to modify their bodies in cyborg fashion to become “greater than human”, available largely to the wealthy. The rest of us, while being human in fact, can be shut out of the economy and redefined by propaganda systems as “dangerous bums”, “terrorists”, or “zombies”, and regardless of the label we will be harshly oppressed.