Anger can arise in a society when a person’s basic needs are consistently unmet, in corrupt and inhumanely managed systems.
Anger can arise when every attempt to live a better life hits the walls of self-serving, venial corruption and lies.
Anger can lead to disappointment, juvenile nihilism as public policy, despair, cartoon leaders who promise cartoon solutions, the celebration of dishonor and lies, sadness and anger over the lack of progress, division, and then more anger.
This process can create a self-reinforcing revolution of lowered expectations, and a revanchist drive to ‘reclaim’ what was lost.
Times of rapid change can foster a potential for heightened creativity, a desire for new ways of viewing our lives and the world around us.
But in our modern world, mostly these drives are being misdirected into illusions and phantoms that shunt us into ever-smaller boxes.
There is an emerging concept among the Silicon Valley tech elite, that humans are becoming obsolete via AI and its applications and that human beings need help to avoid irrelevancy.
This concept goes by various names, but in its most overt form it takes the name of transhumanism. Humans becoming machine-augmented cyborgs is the general idea, humans becoming avatars in someone else’s simulation is its close cousin.
Computer chips in brains, augmented reality glasses, virtual reality experiences, there are more ideas like this from people who believe themselves to be absolutely brilliant than you can shake a stick at.
Transhumanists would like to upgrade you in their image, a more perfect Platonic form version of you! Guaranteed to be free of bugs and glitches, so don’t worry about what the new code is doing to your sense of self and independent decisionmaking abilities.
All good and excellent, but which megacorporation do I choose to rewrite my internal code?
Cultural philosopher Marshall McLuhan observed that as we augment ourselves with new technology, the human faculty it was created to augment or replace tends to strongly atrophy.
McLuhan was thinking about television and radio, washing machines and automobiles. Today he’d likely observe that map-reading has been replaced by phone-based maps, in-person communication has been replaced by texting, social media has supplanted our prefrontal cortex, and so on.
The idea becomes more insidious when we’re talking about augmented vision, hearing, memories, thought processes, and even our internal epigenetics and DNA.
The question gets back to, who do you trust to augment you or rewire your internal code?
(Meliora Meditaton, it should be noted clearly, takes the opposite approach. With Meliora, you rewire and recode yourself).
