re: Was Ted Kaczynski right?

Continued
TL:DR

Article warns that we may become the pleasure/sex/violence organelle of an evolving biomechanical super being

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The first steps of the trajectory leading to the Space Jockey’s fatal enrapture are visible already in the way we now find ourselves wedded to our own, more humble devices. Whatever freedoms our smartphones, etc., give us, we all know how most of the time our engagement with this technology is a kind of compulsion, not pleasure as such. We also know it is sometimes fatal: Escalating fatalities among motorists and pedestrians are being attributed to the inability to withdraw attention from smartphones, and according to the National Safety Council in 2015, it is estimated to cause over a quarter of auto accidents. iStock, credit: KEN226This is exactly what Lacanian psychoanalysis means by surplus enjoyment—a kind of unpleasurable but irresistible drive “beyond the pleasure principle” that is the basis of addictive behavior and that can readily be coopted or extracted. Capturing and recapturing our attention in a drug-like way is not a new aim for media companies and developers of apps, but it is undertaken with increasingly scientific and diabolical precision (by companies with names like Dopamine, Inc.); one frequently hears the argument that this attention-grab is precisely what is scrambling and even destroying the possibility of gnosis (with a small-g) in the modern world, as well as making users increasingly susceptible to manipulation. It is beginning to render The Matrix’s vision of humans immobilized in a virtual reality to capture their jouissance weirdly realistic. The Space Jockey too can be read the same way: as a warning about everything from cyborg modification of the body to drone warfare to video games and iPhones. If we are going to merge with our machines, we obviously would want that “choice” to be conscious and deliberate, something that ultimately liberates and frees us. Donna Haraway suggested that even to hope for such a choice could be a mirage, because we have always been cyborgs: Language, culture, tools, all act on and in the body so thoroughly we could never unplug from them. But there are cyborgs and there are cyborgs. What Giger’s biomechanoids invite us to consider is that there may be no clear horizon beyond which augmenting technological aids or prosthetics become something more enveloping and total, able even to coopt our spirit by holding our attention and keeping us in a perpetual thrall of expectation.(9) As with the hapless mitochondria that power our cells or the quantum microtubules where our prophetic spirits may really reside, there could come a time when our descendants (like, one imagines, the Space Jockey and its kind) no longer remember a prelapsarian eon before they became mere components in their machines. “If someone asks me why my pictures appear so terrifying, dangerous and scary,” Giger told an interviewer in 1985, “I always tell them that soon one day the world could look like this.” Only time will tell if the artist was right, and whether jouissance will continue to be what entraps us in technology, what liberates us from it, or some mix of both … or (who knows?) whether it could even somehow power our spaceships. But optimistic transhumanist promises of contented uploading—and even the darker but similarly materialist visions of being violently wiped out or quietly replaced by AI—ignore the deep and complex questions about spirit in relation to matter, and of materiality in relation to agony/ecstasy, and often appear ignorant of the great antiquity of efforts to address these issues. Giger, almost alone among visual artists in our time, confronted them from the very depths of his prophetic unconscious, to free himself of the nightmares that troubled his sleep.

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Other interesting takeaways:

Slavery is encoded at a very fundamental cellular level (the encapsulation of mitochondria)
Walls (semipermeable membranes) are also foundational/fundamental...

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Blacksmiths and the artists reflect it in their art...

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Consider Giger above and below

"Fitter Happier"

more productive
comfortable
not drinking too much
regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week)
getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries
at ease
eating well (no more microwave dinners and saturated fats)
a patient better driver
a safer car (baby smiling in back seat)
sleeping well (no bad dreams)
no paranoia
careful to all animals (never washing spiders down the plughole)
keep in contact with old friends (enjoy a drink now and then)
will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole in wall)
favours for favours
fond but not in love
charity standing orders
on sundays ring road supermarket
(no killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants)
car wash (also on sundays)
no longer afraid of the dark
or midday shadows
nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate
nothing so childish
at a better pace
slower and more calculated
no chance of escape
now self-employed
concerned (but powerless)
an empowered and informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism)
will not cry in public
less chance of illness
tires that grip in the wet (shot of baby strapped in back seat)
a good memory
still cries at a good film
still kisses with saliva
no longer empty and frantic
like a cat
tied to a stick
that's driven into
frozen winter shite (the ability to laugh at weakness)
calm
fitter, healthier and more productive
a pig
in a cage
on antibiotics



Control...
Control via tech (first music = brain entrainment , then the tell-a-vision = self explanatory, now SM = dopamine abuse)
Control via fear
The inmates regulate themselves with consensus and corrupted “science”

“Computer(s)” will make it all OK...