QAnon's basic problem is that many of its premises are untrue and much of its evidence is fabricated. But it has tapped into something that is fundamentally true -- the US government, and many others, are subservient to interests that do not have "the people's" interests at heart. Intelligent people on both sides of the aisle realize this -- a common initial reaction to what I am about the explain is "we know that; so what?" If you'll bear with me, I will explain both the "what," and the "so what."
The "what" is that we are "governed" by corporations, trade associations, political parties, religions, and other groups that undeniably have a form of intelligence independent of those of their leaders and membership, and have goals which, while they sometimes coincide with those of living and breathing humans, often do not. They do not care if people are happy or miserable, or live or die, except to the extent those results affect their bottom line -- for corporations and trade associations, it's all about profits, for political parties, it is all about power, and for religions, it is about their own survival.
The "so what" reaction points out that all of these things have been very good to us. Corporations provide us with products that increase our comfort, and often save our lives. Political parties enable people to unite behind certain general viewpoints in order to either effect or resist social or other change. And religions provide a sense of community and teach morality to us and our children. And everyone knows that corporations are "soul-less", that politicians political parties are in the pockets of the corporations, and all except at most one religions are wrong. So what's the big deal?
The big deal is that institutions truly do not care if the entire planet dies. They have no sense of their own identity; they are simply programs that are are designed to achieve certain ends -- profits, power, or survival. The same entities that brought us the war in Iraq, that caused the opioid crisis, and that teach that what you believe determines whether you will get into heaven, will not solve global warming for us, will not adequately control artificial intelligence, and will not appropriately deal with ethical issues surrounding the advances in biotechnology -- unless we first get control of them. And given how rapidly things are changing nowadays, there is not much time.
If you ask an adherent of QAnon why they believe what they do, they will tell you "I've done the research." That's code for:
"I've done a lot of googling and visited a lot of chatrooms and a lot of people are saying this."
Pause for a moment here -- why is it that they all gravitate to the same crazy theories? Why does their "research" lead them to these false "truths"?
I'll propose an answer: there is no obvious, easily digestible alternative. There's a lot that's wrong with the world, and QAnon explains it, while the fat cats are denying that anything is wrong and are just getting fatter.
So let's start an Alt-QAnon, starting right here and right now. It can start with this blog post, and I'll promise to develop the theory in a few more blog posts.
The basic point is this:
Corporations, religions, political parties, and other groups have must be thought of as individuals -- as entities that have achieved a form of artificially intelligent consciousness that is programmed only for survival and/or growth. Because of clear analogies to artificial intelligence and naturally occurring superorganisms, we could call them AISOs (for "artificially intelligent superorganisms").
If "AISO" is not catchy enough, we can call them SUCKERS -- for sociopathic, undead, corporate, kleptocratic, engines of rapacity.
In the meantime though, I've settled on WRAITH -- wraithlike artificially intelligent transhuman hives. I like WRAITH because the dictionary definition suggests that wraiths are only wisps of reality, which reminds me of Yuval Noah Harari's contention that corporations exist only in the imagination. I'm going to go ahead and change the reference to AISOs in this and other posts to WRAITHs, with the hope that "hive" will convey what superorganism conveyed before.
Too often, media and society tends to try to identify the individual humans involved in WRAITH decisionmaking, to try to put a human face on whatever the wraiths are doing. That is a grievous mistake and grievously do we pay for it. The goal should be to keep the focus on the wraiths -- on the undead, sociopathic "individual" that is actually making the decisions and calling the shots.
When you view the news and politics through this lens, it's much easier to see what's really going on, and what's right and what's wrong. The point of Alt-QAnon is to call out instances where national or global decisionmaking has been turned over to the WRAITHS, and where the blame for bad news can usually be better placed on a wraith than on the individuals who make up the wraith.
No comments:
Post a Comment