Category: revolution

How Cyberpunk Did The World Become?

It’s now 33 years since Neuromancer was published – establishing the cyberpunk timeframe as near-future – and that’s as long as either Alexander the Great or Jesus had in this world. It’s long enough for this essay to look back from the vantage point of 2017 and see how cyberpunk Planet Earth ended up becoming in this timeline.

Where Neuromancer and Snow Crash were half right was in their prediction of a matrix within cyberspace that filled the human need for societal interaction. FaceBook and the other giants of social media certainly led the ordinary citizens of meatspace to spend a lot more time in cyberspace, but we are still limited to the bulletin board model.

Advancements in virtual reality technology have been limited, to a large part, by the need for extreme amounts of processing power. A VR setup must be capable of generating a sufficient rate of frames per second to avoid latency from the perspective of the user, because this leads to simulator sickness, which decreases the level of telepresence.

So nothing really like the eponymous all-encompassing virtual environment in The Matrix, or the metaverse, has yet arisen.

Where all of the cyberpunk classics got it right was in the widespread adoption of novel classes of synthetic drugs.

Humans have always loved to experiment with consciousness – use of magic mushrooms, cannabis and alcohol all predate the use of writing. So it was fairly predictable that new advances in chemistry would lead to new frontiers in the exploration of mental space.

Although most of the chemical enhancement in cyberpunk literature has been for the purposes of increasing martial aptitude, as in Lucifer’s Dragon, most of its use in consensual reality has been psychonautic. In other words, here on Earth people mostly use the new waves of drugs to get high – but that doesn’t make for very good fiction.

Blade Runner didn’t foresee much different in the way of human drug consumption, but it did anticipate how close artificial intelligence came to passing the Turing Test. Many people chat with bots on social media without even knowing it – especially in online poker rooms and on large politics pages.

Certainly this film, based on Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, accurately captured the uneasiness of being a human and dealing with something that appears entirely human but for subtle differences.

Where the classics tended to get it wrong was politically, especially the diminished role of territorial governments. There seemed to be a glib assumption, perhaps expressed in extremis in Snow Crash, that corporations and the influence of corporations would expand to the point where 20th century-style governments no longer held any power.

In reality, hard iron laws like “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” continue to hold true, and any government capable of raising sufficient taxation to raise an army or secret police will still be a force on the world stage.

In the world of soft power, Transmetropolitan correctly predicted that the political landscape would be as shallow and insane as ever. The absurdity of the various political candidates in Spider Jerusalem’s life are an eerily accurate foretelling of the rise of the Donald Trump/Hillary Clinton circus.

Corporations have started implanting microchips in their employees, which has been a staple of cyberpunk horror for a long time. My own The Verity Key, however, predicted a different path of adoption for microchips under the skin: I figured that people, especially the technophilic, would adopt it themselves for increased access to private space.

It remains to be seen if this will happen – the expense involved in reaching a sustainable critical mass might make private adoption of RFID networks unworkable.

Things didn’t really get as dark and dystopic as cyberpunk predicted. This was always the probable outcome for a literary genre that consciously adopted elements of horror from other genres and from film noir. Things really just became weird. Perhaps the most accurate of all – predicting the current obsession with transgenderism – was Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War.

If there are new avenues of cyberpunk still to be explored, it’s possible that they will feature characters who are unrepentant rebels with regard to questions of cognitive freedom, in particular characters pushed underground by new technologies that make intrusion into the mind possible.

That’s one way in which the brilliant anime series Psycho-Pass blazes a new path: from the harder, engineering and physics based sciences towards the biological ones. Much like The Verity Key, the Psycho-Pass series raises the question of what life will look like when neuropsychological technology advances to the point where the private thoughts of every individual have become a public matter.

The controllers of the mindreading technology in Psycho-Pass are public entities (or at least government ones), which makes for an oppressive totalitarian atmosphere, as opposed to the nihilistic anarchy of The Verity Key. Probably this timeline became more nihilistic than totalitarian, but who knows what might still happen?

With news that remote-controlled drones and tank-like war machines running off AI might soon become cheap enough for terrorists or rogue states to use every day against enemy targets, the most cyberpunk elements of human history, fictional or otherwise, may be still to come.

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Vince McLeod is the author of cyberpunk novel The Verity Key and of the upcoming cyberpunk novel The Man With A Thousand Fathers, to be serialised here starting from the summer of 2018.

The Basics of Anarcho-Homicidalist Etiquette

A couple of dozen supporters of the governing conservative party are shot dead by automatic rifle fire after coming out of a conference, and the gunman is soon shot dead by Police. On his YouTube account the media discover a video of the gunman talking about how his actions were inspired by the philosophy of anarcho-homicidalism. This essay examines the considerations that the anarcho-homicidalist will have needed to have made.

The purpose of undertaking a campaign of anarcho-homicidalism is to effect social change by increasing the adverse consequences of trying to enslave people.

One reason why slavery has been so common in human history is that there are very few downsides to it, as long as you are not the slave. All that’s really necessary is the ability and will to make a credible threat to the physical coherence of another person’s body, and it becomes possible to extort them out of their productivity.

In other primates, this credible threat is based around claws and fangs and is usually made to extort other primates out of food they have gathered or hunted. This is also the long-forgotten origin of slavery in the human animal.

The first ever anarcho-homicidalist action was probably undertaken by a young adult male primate, who had food resources constantly extorted from him through the threat of violence. As he grew from a juvenile into an adult, this male may have developed a physical strength greater than that of his tormentor, and then eventually killed that other ape to protect his own food supply.

When metallurgy became possible, it also became possible to place on other people chains of iron (they were literally chains of copper at first). This represented a considerable advance in the technology of slavery because metal allowed the enslaver to create physical bonds that could not be easily broken.

This meant that it was possible to bind a person to a particular place. Metal also made it possible to enslave people through the threat of stabbing them.

In the 21st century, slavery is primarily a question of chains of silver. These are not physical chains but mental ones. People are bound by their desires, and especially by their fears. They are also bound by confusion and deceit.

The way politicians enslave people with chains of silver is with laws and statutes. The trick with chains of silver is to get the slaves to put them on each other, backed up by the ultimate threat of a sharp and pointy bit of iron.

This method of enslavement reached its apogee in Communist East Germany. At one time it was estimated that 20% of the population were Stasi informants. In such an environment, ordinary people are regularly too terrified to do anything original or creative, and so the ruling classes are free to plunder the place without consequence.

Chains of silver are the basis of the question that has to be asked by modern people who want to be free. In particular, a person has to ask themselves, “At what point does Government overreach become slavery?”

Because once that point is exceeded, the anarcho-homicidalist will consider themselves duty-bound to take action; action predicated on the moral tenet that everyone has the right to kill anyone trying to enslave them.

The consequences of an act such as the one described in the opening paragraph of this essay might be taken if the National Government enforced a law that the anarcho-homicidalist considered to be slavery.

It doesn’t matter what this law might be specifically, because every individual has to decide for themselves at what point the actions of another become an attempt to enslave.

The idea is that, after anarcho-homicidalist action had been taken, the authority figure making the enslavement attempt might think again.

If the previous authority in their position had met a grisly end – such as the conservative party supporters gunned down in the opening paragraph – their replacement might well be conscious that the people they were trying to rule had set limits on that authority.

For this reason it would be necessary for an anarcho-homicidalist to make clear, to whoever was responsible to clean up the mess, why the mess was made.

For example, let’s say that an individual is facing criminal charges for collecting rain water on their own property. After a lengthy court struggle, that individual is put into so much debt that they end up losing the property, and consequently they decide to undertake an anarcho-homicidalist action by killing some of the council members responsible for making it illegal.

It would be essential to, at some point, make it clear to a likely-to-be shocked general public why this action was undertaken.

If the anarcho-homicidalist is shot dead by Police during their action – which is very possible – then it would be necessary to record a message beforehand. This could be a YouTube video explaining the reasons for the action, or a written message.

The important thing is that the anarcho-homicidalist makes clear that their actions are not simple acts of terrorism. Anarcho-homicidalist actions can only, by definition, be taken in self-defence. Therefore, any anarcho-homicidalist taking ultimate action is obligated to explicate their reasons for taking ultimate action, and to explain why their target was an enslaver and not an innocent.

Beneficiaries Are The Only True Environmentalists

The only truly environmentally responsible way of life is to consume less than a sustainable level of the world’s resources. In the West, it’s mostly only those on welfare who manage this

Humans now need the equivalent of 1.5 planet Earths to sustain our current level of consumption, and if we all lived like Americans it would take four. In 2013 we reached “Earth Overshoot Day” – the day by which we had used an amount of the Earth’s resources equal to what it can replenish in a single year – by August 20, and every year it draws closer.

The reason why we would need four Earths to all live at the same standard as Americans is because Americans consume so much more of the planet than the average human. The average American consumes 25 tons of the world’s natural resources every year, and they operate 25% of the world’s motor vehicles, despite only being 4% of the population.

This is broadly true of Westerners in general.

We buy big cars, often with every family member having their own, we buy boats, we go on overseas holidays, we buy enormous amounts of plastic, especially in packaging, and we recycle electronic appliances well before they become obsolete.

One thing can be said for certain about all this consumption – namely, that it will end. The planet is finite whether we like it or not. Sooner or later, like sand through an hourglass, the supply will run out and activity will diminish.

Let’s be honest: we don’t work to live anymore, at least not in the West. Technological advancement has made it unnecessary. The average Westerner has so much accumulated capital increasing the value of their labour that a surplus exists easily large enough to feed us all.

We work because we want more stuff. Fuck Earth Overshoot Day! We want an even bigger car, the latest Playstation, and to upgrade to a McMansion – and we want it now!

We could collectively cut down to working half the number of hours that we do, but we won’t, because the need to accumulate stuff is its own moral imperative.

The GDP per capita in America is around USD57,000 per year, which is close to $75,000 in New Zealand dollars. If Americans use four times as much of the Earth’s resources than what the Earth can sustain, then we can put a dollar figure on the upper bound of possible consumption.

One quarter of $75,000 is $18,750 per year. This figure represents the maximum level of consumption that humans would have to limit ourselves to in order to collectively avoid ecological collapse.

Curiously, $18,750 is a level of consumption roughly equal to what New Zealand beneficiaries are already forced to live on, which raises an interesting point – in the long run, environmental laws dictate that the average person on Earth cannot be any wealthier than the average New Zealand beneficiary already is.

In other words, almost every Westerner with a job – who in almost every case will be spending far more than $18,750 a year – is consuming an amount of the world’s resources that is not sustainable in the long run.

In the long run, the average person cannot consume the world’s resources at a rate greater than that of the current average New Zealand beneficiary.

Considering that all of us will eventually have to cut down to this level of consumption, whether we like it or not, the people who are currently beneficiaries are actually giving us a glimpse of what level of wealth is realistically sustainable.

In that sense they are harbingers of the future, unlike the rest of us currently consuming an unsustainable amount of resources. Thus it could be argued that beneficiaries are the true environmentalists.

The Four Tenets of Anarcho-Homicidalism

Politicians who push things too far might find themselves faced with this

Anarcho-homicidalism is a radical new philosophy that is rapidly challenging people’s conceptions of what is possible within political space. Despite the tooth-and-claw simplicity of the doctrine, it is not always obvious how one transitions into it from a lifetime of statism. This essay examines four basic precepts.

1. Violence is the basis of self-defence.

In this physical, material world, life is dog-eat-dog to a major extent. Cannibalism is, after all, a fairly recent phenomenon in these very isles, and often the only way you were able to avoid this fate was with counter-violence.

It could even be argued that the very concept of violence perhaps not being fully legitimate is a particularly human invention, and even then not shared by all. As such, the concept of illegitimate violence is far from universal.

A truth frequently denied is that all property rights ultimately come down to the capacity to enforce violence. In our modern societies, there is little more to property rights than being able to bring the Police force to bear on any trespassers.

Therefore, your ability to defend yourself comes down to your ability to inflict violence upon anyone threatening you.

2. You’re allowed to kill anyone trying to enslave you.

If any other person tries to make you into a slave, you have the right to kill them in self-defence. This recognises the fact that anyone who approaches you with a will to enslave you is going to succeed unless deterred.

After all, if you are not allowed (or willing) to kill people trying to enslave you, then you don’t have any rights at all, because you will eventually find yourself unable to assert them.

If a person is not trying to make you into a slave, you don’t have any more right to kill them than you otherwise would (i.e. in the vast majority of cases, doing so would constitute murder).

Therefore, the anarcho-homicidalist only strikes upwards; only ever up the dominance hierarchy. If no-one tries to assert dominance over the anarcho-homicidalist then there is no reason for them to upset the peace.

3. Everyone must decide for themselves who they kill.

Not only does the anarcho-homicidalist never strike downwards, but they also refuse to kill on command. Anarcho-homicidalists do not kill on other people’s orders, because to do so necessarily brings into being a dominance hierarchy.

Note that this gives the anarcho-homicidalist cause to shoot any conscription officer that comes to his house. Conscription is slavery, and if someone else tells you that you have to kill another person who you’ve never met, the anarcho-homicidalist is within their rights to turn the gun on the person giving the orders.

An inescapable consequence of the total application of this tenet would be that no armies could ever be raised to attack anyone else, because anyone being pressed into one would simply kill their conscriptor.

Therefore, nothing like the invasion of Iraq could be possible, because there would be no-one willing to serve in a dominance hierarchy that killed on command.

4. Everyone is 100% responsible for the consequences of their decision to kill.

There is absolutely no guarantee that a person taking anarcho-homicidalist action will be protected from the consequences of having done so.

An anarcho-homicidalist might decide to shoot a government apparatchik who works to enforce some totalitarian horror, but nothing within the tenets of anarcho-homicidalism necessarily protects him from the consequences.

The Police and secret services will still definitely come after anyone who homicides a high-ranking political figure, no matter how fervently the homicidalist believes in their philosophy.

However, a sufficient quantity of anarcho-homicidalists would still be able to form an underground railroad for the sake of protecting any of their own who gave the dominators the full measure.

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This is an excerpt from Viktor Hellman’s upcoming Anarcho-Homicidalist’s Manifesto.