Your inevitable microchipped future

all of you in three months

If humanity continues down its trajectory of progress, you will be microchipped. The only exclusion is some scenario where there is no future as we understand it due to apocalyptic settings or post-war environment, or a relentless, sustained effort to the contrary. The last of the three is least likely. Anyone capable of a modicum of rational human thought sees this inevitability. Humans and technology will merge. To disbelieve it is to be incredibly naive.

A distinction should be made between the enlightened paranoid and cranks. Only a fool believes the far-fetched scenario that this is done against the will of the people. It will be at their behest. It will be at their insistence. It will be done in the name of safety. It's already the excuse for our beloved pets, cattle, and wildlife. It also exists already in humans. There is rich irony is in the lack of imagination conspiracy theorists have.  

What dictates society is always in the middle, the average. It's not the fringe people. It's certainly not the lower class. It's about the middle class and average, and how the well-educated and the rich can exploit and influence them. This may change. Currently the average is working class families. They have some form of indentured servitude where they can never turn their back economically on their offspring, nor the health insurance so many of their jobs provide. 

The interest and the economics of the middle class are cemented if you look at the most popular Google keywords for their AdSense program:

Insurance $54.91
Loans $44.28
Mortgage $47.12
Attorney $47.07
Credit, etc

Number one is insurance. People want assurances. People want to know their loved ones are you going to be looked after and taken care of. Parents buy their children expensive smartphones now at increasingly younger ages to know where they are at all times and in case they need help. This great economic mover could change. Like people in Japan and some European countries there could be a decline in reproductive rates. But biology has a clear reproduction bias.

Humans have a clear inclination toward convenience. We are already have computerized banking. We have credit scores. China is experimenting with a social credit rating. We have levels of education and degrees. It stands to reason an amalgamation of these credit and merit systems invariably comes to be.

To some extent this exists. People are tagged. Lawsuits against company forcing the tagging of employees have been filed. We have phones operating to reduce people's privacy right now through metadata and other means. But phones can be lost and left at home. A technology that merges with man theoretically increases safety and security. It is precise and can be implemented with failsafes to guarantee its tied the right person. 

The how of this reality is more curious. If this sort of state were implemented overnight at the direction of government, it would be more easily considered some fascist sign of the endtimes. Instead it will be slowburn. Probably it will stem from the excuse of keeping children and property safe backed by the middle class. Then it will be for the sick, to track their vital signs as a preventative measure. Next could be government officials because the sensitive nature of their work and security clearances. Once critical mass is reached, those still resisting, will be squeezed by way of denied conveniences. At some point it's likely everyone has a HUD, giving you information about yourself and strangers they willingly share. Anyone without a chip will be seen with extreme suspicion. 

How far does it go? Lets say you're a #nochipper, a harsh renegade, still using a flip phone in 2047. None of the conveniences could get you. Depending on how far computer technology advances, it won't matter. As high tech advancements are birthed into our reality, you're going to need them just to fight off the potential threat of these machines manipulated by criminals. If it isn't Big Brother after you, you're compromised by your ratting Little Brother neighbors. Save that, you can be barred from certain experiences or from accessibly communicating with the tech'd up.

There is no viable escape. In a world with increasing technology and automation there's increased need for accountability. Just think of the amount of bodycam footage and cellphone video changing the landscape of media and helping to solve crimes. With its promise to curb violent crime and terrorism it's an easy sell. What was it Benjamin Franklin said, "People who trade a lot of liberty for a little security are absolutely bang on."

Thoughts on this will be expanded upon in controversial upcoming article Ted Kaczynski was wrong

An article about how almost everything ever written is absolutely wrong

visual representation of me coming up with excuses for not writing well

Everything written is wrong. It is only natural that almost everything ever written is wrong. Language itself is not perfect, let alone interpretations of language or grammatical errors. How many perfect sentences have ever been written. Let alone paragraphs. Let alone an entire chapter. Let alone an entire book. There are errors in thinking. There are errors in scientific studies, errors in reporting, errors of shortsightedness, errors in the scientific method itself and its interpretations. And yet despite our fumbling attempts to communicate, great leaps in reason have been made and remarkable inventions. This is in short a poor attempt to justify mistakes and rugged edges. This is an acknowledgement of the reality of large blind spots, biases, and likely irrational circular forms of reasoning that don't even have scientific names yet such as hindsight bias. It seems not enough authors tell and explain this. It's a point that should be reiterated until dull: a person's best work is their best hunch. The reason scientific reasoning often fails by examining the objective world is because it makes little to no attempt to account for the subjective mind of its audience. Therefore every text is a go-by, when accounting for the nearly endless variables of individual subjective human experience. By speaking in declarative statements that leave no room for variance or interpretation, people can close the very minds they wish to open. You see this in the zealotry of partisan politics (social political and moral extremes, polarization), for people who live by one book: people who have found not an answer, but the answer. This system may work for people to a degree, but does not allow for fluid change which is what an active mind does. Scientists and philosophers are often speaking with wisdom gained through their own personal experience, and declare what works for them to be what should be what works for all. This is why knowledge should always be questioned, with the reader or listener having the final say. A more worthwhile author might tell you his or her hunches or show you a path, but the only sane way forward is when the reader decides if it's traveled. 

Ideas on ideas

A non-simulated photo of my brain thinking up this article

What's the easiest thing to steal? You might think first a pack of gum. Continue to think, maybe a pen from work. Or go step further, a paperclip. Eventually you make your way down to an idea. Ideas are almost Bluetooth'd brain-to-brain. There's an idea for something which will inevitably exist. If you yawn, often you'll notice people begin to yawn around you. People also pick up on and copy ticks. Ideas are contagious, especially if they're clever or good. (A distinction was necessary, as intelligence and morality have no innate correlation.) No matter how big or small, if they are heard out loud, actionable, or written down, their spread is inevitable. Let's try one.

Most work is a recurring nightmare you must learn to wake from.

There's truth in it: it's repetitious, it induces dread in thinking persons, and it's vaguely funny. The only way my catchy phrase doesn't take off is if it exists already. That idea wasn't stolen, if it is, it's parallel thinking. Parallel thinking likely comes from our vast society of open and stolen secrets and ideas. Sometimes we get hit with a plethora of new ideas in a new movie, some piece of art, some political figure shares his ideas or opinions, sometimes a meme is made. Ideas are the basis of that which shapes societies. That's not provably true, it's an idea. But you can intuit the basic logic behind it. "I think, therefore I am." Anything else requires speculation and contemplation, or thinking, which is the one and only prerequisite for an idea. Societies are shaped by communities which are shaped by shared values. And what are values? A set of principles on how people and conflicts should be considered and governed. These are basic ideas about ideas.

I bring this up because there is this bothersome idea that ideas are precious or worthless. I've heard most people take their good ideas and inventions to the grave. Why? Perhaps they fear their ideas will be stolen, or worse, are not worth sharing to begin with. People try to pretend around this. But even the greatest minds it seems their greatness revolved around a few revolutionary thoughts. Isaac Newton had an idea about gravity. Einstein had an idea about the speed of light. Camus had an idea around suffering. All ideas in their essence are public domain, especially the remarkable ones, being so intuitive they're impossible to forget.

How many people's lives have been saved by good ideas? We'll never know, because a lot of those good ideas were thought of and implemented before anything bad could happen. How do you gauge who deserves the merit? Who is our greatest mind: Isaac Newton, or his mom, or the first caveman to utter some sort of communication that began language? You can't have calculus without numbers. Three grunts means there's three apples over here. That's how language started, a distant relative of Tim Allen's character on Home Improvement spoke in his native tongue to convey an idea. Perhaps he thought, "If the apple is falling, is the moon also falling?" but he didn't have the grunts to express it like Newton and received none of the credit.

It's difficult if not impossible to quantify merit and creativity. Sure, you can get a sense for it. Some people it's clear drip with creativity. Some people are so conscientious and concise they are engineers, creating value systems and rules, lubricating the gears for creative thoughts and behaviors. Is it any less or any different of a kind of creativity to engage in? Or are they different routes to the same goal? Does a score need to be taken, and would that be something of value? It's clear that order has social utility. It helps me convey this now which is little more than a series of grunts.

We see great competition in and for social status. If you're a bit inclined toward the shallow, you keep up with the Joneses, and you want a bigger house and a car that's a shinier red. If you're a little more informed, you might want to be known as the most charitable. Or if you're truly humble and God-like, you want to do good with indifference to acclaim, and only secretly hope someone finds out about your altruism. There is an order of competence. You trust people with a PhD because that's not easy thing to steal. You trust celebrities because you think you know them, or further, they're your friend. You trust family often, because they have given you a lot of the extraordinarily valuable asset that is time. You trust name brands because they're worth a billion dollars, and one scandal can cause them a lot of that money. Money might be the third greatest predictor of behavior after greed and fear. There's a reason so many problems can be solved under the adage follow the money. Money itself comes with respect, if you earned it, or if it gave you a good education, or if you have so much of it you can freely speak your mind.

It seems humankind is inching towards a meritocracy with every action. Something that combines the popular vote of a democratic system with success under capitalism, with social status, with moral rigor. Billions of lives want to have the best possible life they can have, which is a constant, unending pursuit. It manifest itself in different ways. The self-centered quality of social media. The polarization of opinions in an increasingly connected world where anyone can have a voice. Right now we are in a knives out stage of capitalism. The most common desirable destination among kids is to be famous. There's not a lot of morality and merit, and there is much meanspiritedness and oneupsmanship. Beneath those shallow waves there's hopefully a slower and more powerful undercurrent of people driven to do right.

And ideas shouldn't be neglected as worthless. No one pays for print like they used to. Information is cheap now, because ideas are the easiest they have ever been to spread. The good aspect is the cost of entry for anyone is quite low, and in a fair enough system, the chance for good ideas to succeed is high. We are in a slow burn singularity of sorts, a work in progress. The entire planet beta tests for a future that could be more grand than billions could imagine collectively, or it could end itself entirely.

An autobiography of ideas

A conscious human being has to be defined at their core as thoughts, then ideas, which lead to more specifically their choices or the illusion of said choices. That's what makes up our interaction with shared material reality. Us at our roots are ideas that lead to decisions. A preference of "yes" or "no" is the most often binary decision. Now, the rest of this will play out as a short autobiographical text of my version of this mental landscape in order to help myself or any potential reader.

If I could describe my "ecstatic truth" or the prime motivator, the generator behind these ideas that lead to actions, it would be a scene in Encounters at the End of the World, a documentary about life in Antarctica. There are scenes of penguins in migration, staying safe in routine and their patterns to ensure survival. There is a stray penguin headed toward endless wilderness. Outside his tribe, he will die. It is said if he were removed by human hands and taken back, he would merely return the same way and begin the same path anew. It strikes me there is something telling about this. No one knows if the being is aware of his fate. If that question can be asked, so too, the question of his fate with the routine of the tribe. There could merit to an evolutionary truth in this anomalous behavior. Any sort of substantial change is predicated on atypical behaviors. The actions are high-risk and high reward. This is not an example of going against the grain, which ironically enough has been made cookie cutter and the flirtation with contrarianism is commonplace. It is not drawing outside the lines but perhaps punching a hole through the page. The conclusion could be something new, or end in ruin. This entails an inclination to a transgressive type of behavior. No one is qualified to do something if it's groundbreaking, by definition [Watson].

It's hard to explain the utility in this behavior. It could be a handicap that sometimes proves useful with the right environment and luck. Or it could be a series of choices based on environmental circumstances that lend itself to mentally playing the lottery, sometimes aided by magical thinking. Everyone who has experienced bad luck wants to win small. They only dream of great luck. Winning small is middle class, working as a subordinate, and investing in an index fund returning a reliable 11% a year. Bad luck wants the parity reached by good fortune to even things out with good luck. It's fantastical and mostly lacks utility. But is it magical thinking if it's so commonplace? A life without the faintest flicker of a hope or a dream I don't want to imagine, nor would I consider it life. The penguin may not consider his mortality. Most people hedge their bets, but the heights of their success by these parameters may still be lukewarm. Then, some go against the grain with some unusual trade or begin their own business. Then there are the lucky who seldom have to worry, born rich they can even buy acclaim as "entrepreneurs." And then there are some who gamble between winning and desolate poverty and dead-end social status. For them, winning is not only on financial terms, it could be a meaningful artistic contribution or a scientific discovery.

The beauty of existence is in these decisions that allow for total expression in our limited binary of choice. Science and reason may be preached but magical thinking is the status quo. Hope is an uncontrollable contagion. Even the most rationally-minded thinkers and writers delved into these areas where reason is beyond reach. Those who fail are not a net loss. They are part of the only way to innovation. They teach by informing use what not to do. The problem with scientific literacy is it works best on the initiated, and it may be impossible to lasso the rope of reason over a predisposition to irrationality. If this is the case, pinpointing how to navigate objective reality is a lot trickier than it appears. Your ideas are influenced by these psychic muddy waters, and you don't know what contaminants are in the mind of the person or collective you're communicating with. We know so little, there may be more to be gleaned in studying people's interest in astrology and wrestling than studying astronomy and Shakespeare.

Not playing video games is immature

People who don't video game are losers, they're also wicked immature. It's immature not to. Many want to be seen as an adult. If your primary concern is seeming like an adult, it means you aren't one, and lack the maturity to be what you are without shame. Video games are fun for all ages. Who never had fun as they watched a child chase an invaluable Pokemon in Pokemon Go! that you unleashed in the center of a six-lane highway? And there you stood gleefully with your binoculars on a nearby grassy knoll as you made someone else play Frogger and caused a seven-car pile up.

People negate the great indoors at their own peril. If shut-ins are bad, shut-outs may be worse. Realistically globalization is leading to the homogenization of culture and learning. And yes, experience is important, traveling, seeing the world, but the bigger picture, cosmic way to examine the world has always been led by the atomic study of things. Extroverts prefer the bigger scale, the day-to-day, and experience. The small scale is the inverted look at things preferred by introverts, such as the study of philosophy, and literature and arts. But the formats are polluted. Only post-pandemic are people serious about online learning, for example. If we have popstar singers, writers, and performers, it stands to reason we would have popstar educators so exceptional their courses should be reaching and teaching millions. If education is expensive, hands-off learning of rehashed ideas and textbooks are arbitrarily updated to sell more copies, there can be alternatives to the form. Text is seen as the holy grail because it's words, meaning everyone on Twitter is rich and smart and everyone on Twitch is poor and stupid. It's the opposite. A video game can be text-based, but it can also contain videos, music, and also be hands-on instructional. Most learning is not this.

In the real world, work-life balance, yadda, "gyms are important," fraternize, socialize, and send your child to a summer camp ran by Jared Fogle, whatever gives them the lived experience to write a memoir. But there are only so many life experiences, this is why art and its fantasy are popular in the first place. Yes escapism is bad as is overindulgence in most anything. To hammer against it completely is a mistake. Anything that helps with imagination and ideas is generally a good thing. There's countless scientists and entrepreneurs now who speak of the influence of shows like Star Trek or The Twilight Zone. The real world for most people isn't a nomadic state of ever-changing experiences. Most people's lives are static. They are routine. Drive to work, drive home, eat out, visit family and friends, clean, fret over responsibilities, and do your zero-to-three hobbies. Doing extracurricular things requires time, planning, and money that often people don't just have, if it's possible to do those activities in real life at all. With a VR headset or a monitor you can experience becoming a spree killer or living as a viking.

There's also the history of gaming. Sports is gaming. When the Aztecs would play soccer with decapitated heads it was the original Rocket League. Tetris is based on a Russian sort of dominos. Casinos and cards, checkers and chess are all the same thing just often less sophisticated. Chess is a poor man's Valorant, only, the gatekeeping schizophrenics who play chess and live on a park bench and think the barista at Starbucks is in love with him because she put a heart on his cup get to sound sophisticated while knocking over a toy horse with a toy castle. Nerds. And if they were on Twitch I'd roast their banal comparisons of every societal problem to the fall of the Roman Empire and they'd get even more catatonic and seek more council from the second voice in their head. No mercy for the older, either. The same people who thought video games created violence were playing BINGO. Bingo relies only on your ability to remember numbers, likely a damning condemnation of our public school system where remembering dates is the most anyone learned, people left trying to gamify the one skill they were programmed with. If you updated to Candy Crush perhaps you'd be fun enough your loved ones wouldn't put you in a home to begin with.

 Aside from the odd title, I never played video games in my twenties and before with any regularity. Typically they didn't have much story and the basis was combative and an attempt to defeat the enemy. Now the spontaneous creation, mixed in tandem with literal millions of potential online co-inhabitants surpasses anything I can think of in terms of group-learning complexity. I mean, you're creating essentially a second world, a cloned and artificial reality for which to experiment to any end.  The subsequent potential for education is limitless. No role-playing scenario in a school can compete. There's nothing that could be say, more telling in a simplified way than exploring a domesticated life in Stardew Valley. The idea that as a young person you could faux start a business and learn about the this gradual progression in a safe and fun way and how to profit using a min-max system is invaluable. Plus you can put a hat on your horse.

min max ex.

Education is most effective with interest, and with this I see it becoming gamified. Think of what happens when online learning takes over, and the millions government takes from people for campuses and books is converted to fun learning programs. Naturally when given the choice between education and education that isn't boring people will choose the latter. With virtual reality headsets slowly reaching critical mass this reality is an inevitability. Even if none of this were true, you'd still be dumb for sleeping on a form of entertainment where a single game generated more revenue than any other media ever has, and ignoring for some reason a cultural heavyweight phenomenon and removing it from your vocabulary as a reference. For those engaged, they will have the ability to contextualize if not directly create the future. For the naysayers out there, please understand if you cannot find a video game you enjoy to spend time with it is because you are too dim-witted and unimaginative to glean any value from it, and you're worse for it.

Paintballing as a resolution to war

This is how you change war. Now, as has been said, war is a continuation of politics by other means. War is the “civil” median to solve problems with violence. And yet there are rules and “war crimes,” certain acts cannot be committed. You have rules dictating the ethical ways in which you can murder and imprison your enemies. It was finally taken seriously after WWII with the Geneva Convention.

But if we can agree not to use chemical weapons, why can’t we take it a step further and make the rules of war more stringent? This is the simple new rule: all future wars are one civilized paintballing tournament.

 

This will be great for several reasons:

1. The most important of which is we can now profit from wars. I mean, not in the traditional sense of stealing natural resources, weapons contracts, securing the dollar as the reserve currency and maintaining power consolidations. We can air war footage, live and in real time. This is good, because with On-Demand streaming services no one wants to watch commercials anymore, this is a reason to tune into basic cable and more of an “event” to share, new wars will begin #trending in no time.

Because war is driven by petty, primitive behavior, all war-time paintballs, paint bombs, and paintbrushes (knives) are legally required to be an emasculating “hot pink” in color. There will be NO MORE flag burning, either. Instead, you must take your opponents flag and wash it with a basket of red underwear until it achieves the correct rosy hue.

Atomic paintbombs will blow this acrid color all over leaving cities and towns demoralized. Dejected men will walk around like barbies, slathered in this repulsive paint, more traumatized than if their platoon had actually died. You were defeated, and the town you knew your entire life is now a concrete rose garden. Worst of all your sisters, mothers and wives will say, “Maybe this defeat isn’t such a big deal after all,” as the hit up their local Hobby Lobby to find matching drapes.

This brings us to another fair point.

2. Paint-war will bring about breast cancer awareness. Why not tie it in? Apparently, no one’s aware of breast cancer. This is the true apocalyptic landscape. In all future dystopian movies you’ll have a shot of the pink statue of liberty.

3. People will still die. People will slip and die as the streets run pink with the “blood” of war. Paintbombs will kill and maim. Spraypaint like napalm will leave soldiers blinded. There will be deaths from shrapnel. 

 

Of course, activist groups will complain this is inhumane, but on the daily there are terrorist bombings, beheadings, and dead soldiers, but they are only really upset this ruins the mood of the alone time with their caviar-scented vibrators.

4. The mainstream media can remain relevant. Second to only the military-industrial complex is the media-industrial complex. They align lockstep with government historically, playing into xenophobic fears and profiting from advertising revenue as they siphon a sense of importance from tepid reportage. Without war, there is no self-aggrandizing moralism to use as a platform to place themselves above the masses.

 

image of future city destroyed by war

5. War-torn cities of the future still quite livable. Look up some photos of post war societies after foreign interventionism. The devastating toll is incalculable. Perhaps the rainbow roaded, post-war towns of the future will be the impetus for some real reflection on the true cost of war.

6. It doesn’t have to end at war. It can be fitted to gangland shootings. Spree killers might be cool for once. Members of society mimic their culture. Losers like Nikolas Cruz might think twice next time and instead go for a paintball shooting spree. Sure, they would get expelled and lose most future job prospects, but they would get their point across in a safer way and after a couple years probation they could be interviewed on Good Morning America on why they attacked church goers with waterballoons full of lead house paint.

Add any additional reasons in the comments, as this is a brilliant idea but also a work-in-progress.

Top 9 Famous Homes I'll Live In

Most of these are from movies because I don't research iconic houses

This house which I forgot the name of

The underground lair from TMNT

Jackie Treehorn house

Plagiarist fraud Jonah Lehrer owns the cool iconic Shulman House and goes to show you dishonesty pays

The House from Parasite

Zabriskie Point House - Featured in the movie and blown up, this was likely the inspiration for the Iron Man house and which was subsequently blown up. Also a cool abode used by Orson Welles movie and the documentary They'll Love Me When I'm Dead

Shadow Gallery is a chill joint

A rare good thing about the movie Tron

 Ex Machina home w/robot maids


Realistically they're all by Frank Lloyd Wright rather than these big windowed whore houses for voyeurists