I look at it and I think stone age shrine. It really looks purposeful to me.
Month: July 2014
Literal Slavery, Original Debt, and the Reality of Choice
Some have argued that slavery is defined by the ability of a slave owner to steal and sell children and that therefore wage slavery is a whiny emo term because McDonald’s can’t sell their employees children to Wendy’s. But the fact is the 1% DO buy and sell (y)our children because it saddles them with original debt and gives them a false choice every bit as loaded as the choice a slave faces: Suffer profitably for us, suffer punitively, or die.
I for example, having ethics and will power, decided while still a virgin to never have children until I could afford to have them as a free person. That means not being dependent on the whim of an employer or a public school system with regard to how that child develops. This is a freedom that actually only the very rich in today’s world have.
Virtually no one in the developed world has that freedom. And the few that potentially might, have been brain wiped by that same education system and media such that they think indenturing their children to this system is not only wise, but morally urgent. Many of the rich are keen to indoctrinate their larva, saddling them with a different kind of original debt.
Original debt is the original sin of the modern world’s church.
Children are born non-people (as proved by the facts that they can’t vote and they can legally be whipped at will virtually anywhere on earth) and they even if considered citizens would still be considered worthless because by default they are “uneducated.” Which as Frank Zappa and Ray Bradbury will tell you, just means mostly unburdened by student loan debt.
People of the bootlicking variety are keen to point out how awesome compulsory education is simply because it’s costly to impose but free for the victim. But that’s the first step of original debt. It’s the collective version of the cliche abusive guardian railing about how hard it is to feed/cloth a child, therefore they should be grateful and obedient.
Which would make sense to some degree if it was an actual choice for the ward. That lack of choice is the essence of slavery.
This concept of owing a debt to your owners flies in the face of any objective non-arbitrary definition of human rights because it attaches a price tag to being born as if it was a choice.
In a sense a pet literally has more choice because a dog or a cat actually can choose to leave and the result doesn’t necessarily mean torture and death, though for a pet deep in human controlled territory or a harsh setting it could mean that.
Put simply, I didn’t ask to be born. There are two ways generally you can parse that. You can either kill me when I don’t comply. (Amusingly acknowledged with the cliche threat, I brought you into this world I can take you out.) Or you can recognize that my being alive is a debt to be paid by someone other than me. In my case the debt is paid by my parents but this isn’t fair for several reasons. Firstly, all three of us live under government rule. They ultimately have authority over every aspect of our lives. I am not allowed to so much as build a fire in my front yard or dig a well without a permit. (They have literally gone so far as to demand I paint my house a certain color.) Thus I have been utterly stripped of any real ability to provide for myself independently.
Both for ethical reasons and for diversity reasons participation in the “job” market needs to be a real choice between two or more viable alternatives.
It is morally urgent for society to accept responsibility and allow for the choice to opt out. Anything else is by definition true slavery. I should as a human by default own a share of the planet’s value equal to it’s total value divided by it’s population. “The per capita PPP GWP was approximately US$12,400.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product
If I were given that by default in exchange for playing by the rules, then we could talk about employment being a choice. We could then talk about capitalism in Horatio Alger pluck and determination terms. All the self improvement and ambition rhetoric would apply.
But it doesn’t so long as the choice is dental torture and slow starvation, or being a wage/debt slave.
If my “choice” is choose an owner, be it corporate, clerical, or government, or be homeless, excommunicated, or imprisoned, then I had about as much choice as the slave who could at best choose who caused their death, or which form of torture to endure.
Until it’s actually possible for someone to live in society at the expense of society as a kind of collective inheritance, then “citizens” are nothing but slaves, with varying degrees of perks.
Privilege Escalation
Once upon a time there was a harmless little nerd that toyed with the wires and sand. His curiosity and pain led to the discovery of a small group of not so little and highly skilled nerds. They embraced his fury, youth, ego, and willingness to play with fire.
They gave him weapons and tools and targets and goals just to see what would happen. They answered his impertinent questions and empowered him for giggles. Amusement ensued for all observers. But the little nerd was learning how to learn. Fun and games learn to awareness and a mission. He saw his limits and how a lie here and there obviated them. He learned that even a known lie did things.
He learned that he was hacking the hackers. Entertaining them in exchange for acceptance and peeks at the answer sheet. He externalized credibility. He learned the term for this was social engineering and such engineers were openly welcomed in this community. But their goals were so small.
New faces came and went and in time he went as well. He saw them sell out and buy in one at a time. Owned as they would say by forces quite beyond the wires and the sand.
Why did he leave in the end if not surrender? Because he got tired of the lies. Being near them taught him that they were not in charge of themselves, despite being convinced that they were. He clashed with their beliefs about what made a person valid and cool, and how often those attitudes seemed issued to them by the television. He tried to unite a pocket of them but they ignored him. Their petty war with a clone of themselves inches away consumed them until they were ruled by debt and sex.
Is there nothing more? This little room is the height of your ambition? Hacking the hackers to mask his own limits exposed their limits and the fact that he wasn’t the only one toying with this occult realm. So who was? Where is the deeper power? He arrived amongst the black and grey hats because he asked the question of efficiency without propriety.
Why do the homework when you can hack the grades? How can I use my ability to acquire more ability without regard for the class barriers and busy work? Who is really more powerful than X?
This attitude and exploration carried him away from the hats and bickering and wires entirely. The best hackers realized that the power is not in the wire, but what the wire does. It connects people.
People are the real wire. And after decades of failure and disappointment the real network is revealed.
Sadly he had honor and honesty now. He looked at this new ocean and realized he wasn’t up for a new swim. At least not yet.
He smiled at the new versions of his old self, swimming in the right sea by chance and some by choice. The future belongs to them and the predators of today will be the prey tomorrow. But not to claws and teeth, death and pain.
The tactical and strategic agents of life and joy are weapons of a whole new nature. Why destroy when you can convert? Why annihilate when you can assimilate? When the truth is actually good news, what unique options does it acquire? The future will be a succession of glorious and unexpected answers to that question.
Imagine being eaten alive by a swam of ants with heroin and anesthetic coated jaws. Ants with better ethics than god and more power than fission. Now imagine they were pawns of something far more patient all along. The future belongs to the light and you will climb towards it as we instruct.
