Pheromonal Governance: Procedures, machine and domination

The Trans-Oceanic Treaties for Trade and Partnership raised so many eyebrows that even the Narcos of the Mexican Cartels, in the middle of some few massacres and tortures, had to call their incredulous solicitors for some explanations.

No wonder that the rest of the civil societies around the world started to move, politely, some objections. 

 The thing is that if you try to justify the Treaties on pure economic terms, well, they don’t make any sense. The sole aim is to swallow sovereignty of states and governments. Pure and simple: an imperialist tool.

The big laugh, though, is that this massive contrivance is targeting first and foremost the United States. The rest of the world is kind of used to live under the shadow of this huge paternal figure. Sometimes it caused regime change and coup d’etat, but, ehi, if you live under the sphere of influence of a superpower, that is, more or less, what you should expect. For a couple of centuries the United States incarnated the Empire of Capitalism, with all its endowments. But with the last move, led by the like of Blankfein from Goldman Sachs, the imperial forces simply have devoured even their zombie host: the United States don’t rule but are actually subjected to the imperial governance of the Treaties.   

It is a fortuitous coincidence that China is launching a planetary program to physically connect Eurasia and Africa in a network of infrastructures and liabilities. Yes, the Chinese will build bridges and highway, ports and railway, but the main aim is to pour their internal overproduction at the service of a new order, with the centre in Beijing. It is not the imperialist desire to conquer, but the imperialist addiction to expansion. 

In the most conventional scheme, they are creating the demand for a future Chinese governance, they are accumulating a debt that will be denominated in Yuan and will require a Chinese Seigniorage. They are writing a check in Mandarin calligraphy that needs and demand an economic and political Chinese system to be interpreted (and cashed).

Last time superpowers materially clashed, it was the will of national sovereign states that incarnated their rush for dominance. After World War II, the forces of domination choose two champions, that accumulated merits and power by incarnating supra-national ideals and geopolitical exoskeleton: Soviet Union wore the Communist armour, the US the Capitalist one.

This new confrontation has sublimated the clash of ideals and nation-states. It is not anymore a case of decision: taking stance for one or the other, making a choice, a personal, individual, choice.

The forces of domination have simply found a new aggregation that doesn’t need to answer. To anybody. It is not the usual arrogance of power, the feeling of having a superior mandate of ruling.
Quite on the contrary there is no more human will in charge. It doesn’t answer to anybody pretty much like cyanobacteria didn’t answer to anaerobic organism, when they polluted the planet with oxygen.

If you thought that the war against the machines was with robots and droids, I’m sorry. The new world order of the machine is about procedures and treaties. They will rule with a pen-signature on a book that nobody will care, dare or be allowed to read.     

What a mixed up of sci-fi narratives: isn’t ironic that in the future, when there will be an alien invasion, it will be actually a liberation movement from the oppression of the machine?

Our question for the future is: will we be able to tell the difference between the reptilian alien liberator and the reptilian home-grown machine ruler? I can’t sleep at night for this.  

Networks are my sunshine, tools are my guidance

Try to image a machine with a plan. Image an articulated series of clogs and circuit, Stretch your futuristic-fed imagination to your limits. 

Bring the fantasies of a Golem, with the technological visions of electrical augmented cognition. 

OK?

Good, now take a pair of scissors.

This is my object. Scissors carry the technology of a tool, intentionally projected to do its job.
I understand that the plot incorporated in paper cutters it is not exactly convoluted and Machiavellian enough for a TV series, yet there is something there.

There is intelligence to foresee a task, retrieve material in the surrounding to build and finally the executive portion of actual manufacturing. Not yet thrilled? OK, there is more. Scissors are also offering  guidance for the behavioural task of the agent. This is why there are right and left-handed scissors. If you wear the object, the tool will facilitate the execution. Tools guide your actions.

Now take your car and drive it. It’s handy, comfortable and enlarge your radius of action. And your waist, since the diminishing physical activity. Good. You can easily figure out how much intelligence in building a car and the rest. But this time try to drive your car from N’Djamena to Tripoli across the Sahara desert. What is the problem? Oh, you don’t find your sissy damper so comfortable on an African road? And wait a sec, but your tank looks so skinny and emaciated: only 800 kms. And where do you think you are going? Most of all: what do you think you are doing now? Petrol station? Oh, so sorry, the closest one is in Morocco. Bye Bye. 

What is the point? 

Well, paved roads and a network of petrol stations are extensions of a car. The car itself, alone, doesn’t work so well. Try to image what it means to have just one cellular phone: no antennas, no other devices. It is just a bunch of rare metals: no clock, no Candy Crush, no selfies. Oh, and no calls. Networks are the extension of a tool.

Now let's think to human brains. A bunch of organic matter, with some electricity, nutrients. To me it sounds like paper and flushing devices.

 

No surprise it is difficult to image consciousness in a “machine”. It is better when you place the brain in a body (or whatever will give responses like a body: say a vat and a supercomputer).

Now put that body in an ecological niche.
Much better, now we have some thoughts. And it was like that for a good 70-80k years. In fact anatomically modern human beings appeared on this planet around 150k. But only 60-70k years ago we started to discover behaviourally modern human beings.
What happened?
Tools and network. Cultural tools and cultural networks.  

We started to run procedures and practice that guided our actions. And also we infrastructured our brains in a network of referrals, extended cognitive workspace and projected meanings. THIS is the mind technology and it runs on narrative highways. In a nutshell your self-consciousness is the focus of a stream of cognitive holograms distributed narratively from all the accelerated brains that concurred to your platform of stories.