automation

The Big Homunculus

“I see its eyes as they move in its head and on to me. I feel it looking at me. I feel that it apprehends the very nature of my being and at the same time transmits its own. I move, but I cannot move from its sight. Happily, I am transfixed.” — Jodi Stroman, Gimmicks

The new era had unleashed a new evil: the birth of the Big Homunculus. As the buzzword left the mouth of the Reality TV presenter it was quickly absorbed into the Society of Watchers. Some concern was shown for a rabbit hole that lead to the tomb of established law and order. Later in the day, the buzzword was rediscovered on the floor of the interrogation room, scrawled on repeat prescription.

The cyberneticians introduced the template for a new kind of unreality. Pseudoscience had brought the human population into unerring compliance with the social body. Society’s gods were factual data that were fabricated, re-constructed and replicated by the available machines. Automation provided freedom of expression under the rule of the economy. There would be no need to compete for survival because the thing called society would be ruled over by the majority and finally reach total democracy.

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To Hell with Protocol

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“The primary model for human relations in consumer society is the ‘contactless’ tap or swipe.” — Milda Tinguali, The Consumer Vortex

Nasrul awoke to the news that the town square had been firebombed and the area cordoned off by military police. Interferences and disturbances had become commonplace in the last few days of the dying of the embers of the empire of the senses.

There were those who said there was a panicked, frenzied grasping for the familiarity of undying chaos and slaughter.

The electricity supply ran out, making it impossible to uphold data transfer rates in another region where the in-communicability of the known impressed itself, rendering members of the general populace speechless, while some stared into space for hours on end, only pausing to eat. Without servility and submission to enterprise, there was nothing left for anyone to speak about, nothing to communicate. (more…)