The politician and the banker both cum in unison at the prospect of true pleb mind control becoming a reality.
Of course they do. If I was a member of the upper class, and I thought that plebs were ruining my offspring's chances of experiencing the same luxury that I do, and that resource wars and planet-scale civil conflicts were inevitable (these people want you to eat bugs because they go to seminars where a speaker gets up on a stage and tells them we have to eat bugs or we’ll all die of resource depletion), pretty much the #1 thing I'd be interested in doing with BCI tech is using it to suppress people's desires so they behave in a more frugal and civil manner and are less likely to rebel over shitty living conditions. Why else do you think they’d want a Great Reset? You need some way to ensure revenue streams after you’ve cyber-lobotomized everyone, so you take all their property and force them to passively work and rent like serfs in order to live. Why would they do that? Well, that’s simple enough. There is only one thing that is lethal to the system we have right now, and it’s if people stop consuming. That’s how all depressions begin; with people hoarding money. The government isn’t giving you stimulus checks to make you happy and content. It’s right in the damn name. It’s an economic stimulus to keep people consuming and discourage them from hoarding money. It does nothing if people stuff it in a savings account and never look at it again. If people aren’t consuming, then they aren’t getting into debt. If they’re not getting into debt, then Big Finance doesn’t get their cut of the growth that is occurring. It operates exactly like a racket, but we call it an economy because we’ve been brainwashed to. Now, imagine you’re the head of this racket, and you’ve just been told that further GDP growth is impossible without irreversibly destroying the environment. How do you keep people consuming at the same rate? Well, obviously, you make them all share the same things. Instead of owning a bike, they all pay a certain amount per hour to rent the same bike. Do you see what’s changed? It’s the same unit of growth, but now, everyone is paying to consume a communal product.
This is exactly how the neoliberal prosperity gospel ends. It ends exactly as I predicted eight goddamn years ago. It ends in a neofeudalist surveillance state.
Nobody likes talking about behavioral economics. The very basis of any economy is value. More specifically,
what people value. Modern economics treats value like a black box. For instance, most people would clearly want a coffee table in their living room more than a pile of fresh manure, but the field of economics isn’t concerned with the commonsensical notions of why someone would want a table more than poo. It just looks at the
effects of that, by analyzing transactions in a market. So, even though people are constantly bombarded with propaganda in the form of advertisements that encourage them to consume endlessly, we assume that their decisions are entirely rational and there’s no need to analyze why. All fields of economic study work like this, except for behavioral economics, which rather more directly concerns why people behave as economic actors and what they value.
If you’ve ever seen a TED Talk by perennial burnt face man Dan Ariely, you’d know what this entails.
There is only one recourse for a dying system like ours, and that’s directly altering what people value by sticking wires in their heads. The tech to do this is not new. They've been shoving electrodes in animal brains and altering their behavior since the sixties.
Neuroscientist based at Yale in 1960s controlled bulls, monkeys and humans with brain implants and envisioned a “psychocivilized society”
blogs.scientificamerican.com
“The Forgotten Era of Brain Chips,” published in Scientific American
in October 2005, has provoked as much interest as anything I’ve ever written. It focuses on Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado, a pioneer in brain-stimulation research. I keep hearing from journalists and others wanting more information on Delgado, whom I interviewed in 2005 and who died in 2011. Delgado fascinates conspiracy theorists, too. An article on Infowars.com describes him as a “madman” who believed that “no human being has an inherent right to his own personality.” Given widespread interest in and misinformation about Delgado, whose work prefigures current research on brain implants (see “Further Reading”), I’m posting an edited version of my 2005 article. --John Horgan
Once among the world’s most acclaimed scientists, Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado has become an urban legend, whose career is shrouded in misinformation. Delgado pioneered that most unnerving of technologies, the brain chip, which manipulates the mind by electrically stimulating neural tissue with implanted electrodes. Long a McGuffin of science fictions, from
The Terminal Man to
The Matrix, brain chips are now being tested as treatments for epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, paralysis, depression, and other disorders.
In part because it was relatively unencumbered by ethical regulations, Delgado’s research rivaled and even surpassed much of what is being done today. In 1965,
The New York Times reported on its front page that he had stopped a charging bull in its tracks by sending a radio signal to a device implanted in its brain. He also implanted radio-equipped electrode arrays, which he called “stimoceivers,” in dogs, cats, monkeys, chimpanzees, gibbons, and humans. With the push of a button, he could evoke smiles, snarls, bliss, terror, hunger, garrulousness, lust, and other responses.
Again, the biggest problem with BCIs back then was the fact that the electrodes are stiff and brain tissue is gooey and wobbly and flexible. Imagine having a wire jammed in your brain, and then getting into a car accident and having your brain bounce around inside your skull. Not fun. The main engineering challenge of the past few decades in coming up with working BCIs has been looking for electrode materials with the same modulus of elasticity as brain tissue, which also won’t cause inflammation or scarring. This has led to the development of some
extremely tiny electrodes, like the ones used with the Neuralink device.
Neurons and their synapses have valve-like behavior, like transistors, but unlike transistors (that only have two states, on or off), neurons operate on a sliding scale, much like another device called a memristor.
The connectome of a human or animal brain is extremely complex. Even the latest imaging techniques fail to map it with perfect precision.
www.humanconnectomeproject.org
Even with a map of the brain, it's very difficult to decode what a brain is thinking based on the signals it's putting out. Living brains don't have an operating system or programs in the traditional sense.
How should anyone know for certain?
I think to some degree our brains are already somewhat controlled by computers. Or in any case, influenced. Our brains are contstantly rewiring and our reward system is influenced by such things as red notification symbols (which are kind of a clicker trainer that we use to train animals). Various outrage media helps put us in angry or fearful states. Both Trump and his competition used this to great extend.
I know a lot of people like me that used to read a lot when they were younger, that just don't really read books anymore (I still do). When I ask them why, it's that when they try, they start to check their cell phone after two minutes. The computer/brain interface is already a pretty small loop. This can only make it smaller.
It also makes me think of nineteen-eightyfour and its two-way television. In the end, though spying is rampant, it's actually the one way that was the most important in our history, the effect of mass media. This development is supposedly just about one way, too. Control computers with your brain.
The spying in our time is a little more covert than it is in that book. It always surprises me how few people really understand the degree to which their phones spy on them. Most just have a vague idea of it, quickly forgotten. If I were an evil bastard (CIA, mossad, chinese spies, etcetera), I'd use it to look inside people's brains and if I could, to affect it too.
We already don't know how deeply we're often influenced by media, through such things as product placement, or scripts that are rewritten at the behest of various interests. How much further will that go when objects are directly interfacing with our brains?
I remember an article a couple of years back how they could use magnets to change people's threat assessment levels (reducing it, and as a result, reducing beliefs in a god and getting a more tolerant attitude toward immigration).
How easy would it be for such a device to do something like that? I don't know the technical details, but it's something I'd look into if I were an evil bastard.
Several years back, I overheard a conversation between two rich suits about Big Data. It pains me to say it, but they’ve had a surveillance panopticon trained on us for years and years, observing what we consume, when, and how. There is so much of this data, they whined, the biggest problem wasn’t obtaining it. It was sifting through it for pertinent information, using AIs and algorithmic filters. If they wanted to digitally emulate capitalism under a totalitarian neofeudalist regime, they now have more than enough information to do that.
