Monday, October 9, 2023

"Corporate Greed"

More and more discussions are arising about corporations and their "greed". The term "corporate greed" is an error in personifying a machine. 

When we personify we make a grave mistake in empathizing with a machine who by-definition can never empathize with us - can never care about our interests, much less act in a way recognizable to humans. Greed is after all a sin reserved for humans, no other animals are capable of it in any significant way - let us keep it that way! To extend the same feelings to a corporation is insane and reductive.

The need for an emotive and concise description for a powerful entity behaving destructively is necessary - Greed is just off the mark in a dangerous way. 

Millionaires are not greedy. Billionaires are not greedy. Trillionaires  are not greedy... 

No one has a billion dollars in their checking account. No - financial institutions are created to protect, reinvest, and continue to build the machine. Human-centric values are removed from the equation. The algorithm-language can reduce all externalities to cold-steel variables. Variables which can be calculated to either be good for the machine's power, or obstacles. The most successful algorithm destroys its obstacles. Even if the obstacles may have existed for a reason, or deserve to exist on their own merit? That is not an issue for the algorithm - the obstacle should have thought of that before it decided to be poor!
 
These machines are acting in the same accordance that any other life 
is - to survive under external pressure and to propagate for future generations. However when one becomes a x-ionaire the magnitude and scale of the power the machine applies is different. It becomes a disconnected entity that propagates itself like a living creature. A creature that no longer speaks the human language - only the language of money - money which must be consumed to survive. Consumed on a daily and exponential basis. 

Given the opportunity all life will try to overcome its obstacles to survival. Since it no longer speaks a human language it will expand its power in every way to gather more power. 
 
The costs of survival in ever more extreme environments for common multi-cellular life are met with diminishing returns. However when everything has a price tag, and the machine has more currency than anything, there is only this outcome.

The creation of insulating layers seems justifiable with the objective of survival. However this analogy breaks down as we recognize the machine's life is incomparable with our own. The creature gathers layers of bureaucracy and management to enact it's only brutal objective - to survive. The enormity of the creature will make it's choices less and less recognizably human. Machines are not greedy - they are expressions of natural tendencies. 

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Fortune set in motion by luck or genealogy continues to warp our one world into the grotesque.

Taking suggestions for a new word for this type of life - this monster-machine.

Tuesday, June 6, 2023

Stone on Stone

The awareness of existence like two great granite slabs getting pulverized by one another. You are one slab, reality is the other - a great rough slope. Sliding down a face with incomprehensible geologic pressure, chips and chunks flying in your face as both your consciousness and reality are carved by your existence. 
 
You are consumed and spent as you go. How can one be expected to pull your head out for a breath or sense of direction? Your senses are overwhelmed and minor compared to the great grinding descent.
 
Your choices are ruined by the great pulverization - all paths lead down slope to similitude, illusion, and mediocrity. There is no stopping your descent and grind down the slopes of reality.

You are too close to the fracturing action to change your direction in but only the most minor ways.

Great powers observing your situation over your lifetime might see a great but common scar down the granite slope of reality. With it, billions of others on common paths, mostly directed along those of least resistance. Many again shattered and split among the many hazards along the slope, mostly unavoidable by most. Many again reaching their journey's physical conclusion, reduced to dust and picked up by the wind.

Sight

It should be a great test of strength and vigilance to spend great segments of one's life with the eyes closed. Among the senses, sight betrays temporary safety and distracts from the remaining senses that are adjacent, immediate, and mindful. To practice blindness is to accept the present moment in all it's proximal horror.

Your challenge then is to walk 10 steps with your eyes closed, in a parking lot or otherwise flat, unobstructed area. Count your steps, understand and accept your loss of control. Pretend for a moment to be blind, to be conscious of your comparative powerlessness and impotence.


Wednesday, March 29, 2023

The Madness Incarnate - The Great Melancholy

First, a resolute warning. 
 
These letters by the damned were grim wards to the survivors, inspiring bleakness; love letters to the end of the current trajectory. The following will also be released in my book, in the form of "resignations" discovered by characters therein.
 
The following toxicity can leach into the unwary, challenge even the most fortuitous. 
 
Having never placed a warning before I hope it is not ignored. 
 
The bent can be broken. I don't want to hurt anyone. 

Please be sure you have the emotional and mental bandwidth to process the following challenging piece.


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It is not just a personal melancholy. I have problems deep rooted in the condition of the world I inhabit. It's not right, it's all an accident, with no correcting hand that isn't profitable. What can you do if correction is non-profit when cancerous growth is so profitable? What will the cancer do when it sees correction coming? When it sees goals contrary to its own existence? It will stamp it out as a threat, with no soul, with no mind to anything but the dollar sign. Signed and approved by the law. Its gone too fucking far. The foundations and soul of humanity are being strip mined for their last precious resources. The world burns as we squeeze the last few dollars out of stones for corporate. 
 
How do you stop such an impregnable fortress? 
 
Such a monster that feeds on itself, and has fed billions of lives. Those billions kept alive are done no real kindness. Their bellies are full of calories only for the benefit of the monster looming over the whole planet, with no shadow, no overt threat the human mind was evolved to recognize

Only fire and death. I have looked and desired nothing else more than an alternative. 
 
It's too late to move as slow as we would've liked, as peaceful. The things we have to do for a better world for the next generation to live better will not be pretty. We have to trust that we can emerge on purpose and with balance. But the change necessary to kill a great cancer, can kill its host
 
Fortunately this cancer has no soul to grieve. Unfortunately the agents entrenched and invested in its growth need to change. 
The hope is that this change can be brought about through convincing the people and not be a death sentence. Many are so entrenched they would rather die than see change. We need their agreement, but can't settle for promises, it's too late. Given that many of the powerless will die or few of the powerful, we choose the few. It will be both in the end. 
 
But power coalescing and spiraling cancerously in the distance is no longer acceptable. That end races towards us. 
 
How do we swim out of a whirlpool? Together. 

I looms just over the horizon, maddeningly. A crucible, a monument, to give you lesions for your very existence.
This great trough in the waters on the waves of humanity and the mental and physical health of the vessel we inhabit. The vessel is taking on water. We can't keep up with the repairs. A slowly unfolding catastrophe that is to be drowning – to be alive.
Humanity is not evolved for this. An endless gale blows in our face, impeding our progress. Always the wind blows. It rips and tears at our very existence without consent. Ever must the economy-humanity gale grow (for are they inexplicably enmeshed) and absorb all which cannot resist. The closer you come to creating your own winds, the harder the winds blow. Closer to competing, more pressure; ranging asymptotically. 
 
For no matter how close you get, even if you could, could you penetrate that final veil? There is no way to alter that fate, that inevitable power concentration. For the economic engines have no human respect to them. They do not recognize human values. Silently, legally obligated, to grind bones to make the greatest return on investment. Absorbing all resources and threats, even legislating its own coalescence.
 
For in the end, if you can't beat them, join them or submit. And who has the energy to face them? If the pressure from where you're standing is already such a great storm

Is this what those other greats felt? Is this it? This foundational, irreducible, nightmare attacking from all sides? In every waking moment, to every man, woman, and child, born to the 99.99%? Too fucking smart for their own good. Too good at riding the spiral out. Too good at riding the waves in the storm, at ignoring the
threatening colossus. We are a product of our environment, as it is.
 
To synthesize the death, toxicity, and cancer. 
 
There is some peace there, but not for we; the madness incarnate.

To Tell a Forestory

At the end of Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind we are asked this simple question:

What do we want our descendants to want? Here are my answers:

to advocate and connect with each other
to find ecological balance
to spiritually replace religion
to simplify government and reduce the size of people's representation
to understand ideal work-life balance
to implement ranked-choice voting
to remove money from politics
to control monopolies
to educate against fascism and dictatorship
to be represented by leadership with similar age and values
to rewrite general education 
to discuss philosophy
to continuously improve
to avoid problematic labeling, so as to remain united
to immunize against propaganda 
to explore and utilize our solar system
to explore and improve their animal body and brain
 
Pick one and be inspired.