AnthroTechne
Copyright © 2012 LANCE
MILLER
ALL RIGHTS GRANTED TO
PUBLIC DOMAIN
BY THE AUTHOR
LANCE MILLER.
this.is.lance.miller@gmail.com
ISBN-13: 978-1479284276
ISBN-10: 1479284270
Dedicated to those that use electricity combined with alphabets to
think.
Chapter 1
I PLEDGE TO EVOLVE
TECHNOLOGY PLEDGING TO EVOLVE ME.
The Industrial Revolution was the
widespread adoption of machine automata to perform labor. Machine
automata in the form of servomechanisms.
Before mass use of servomechanisms our
notions of self were vastly simple: we were defined by the family we
were born into and our position within that family. Social
advancement was rare and the concept of "individuality"
wasn't something people practiced.
Individualism arrived with the
Industrial Revolution, which for the first time offered rewards for
initiative, ingenuity and ambition. Suddenly, individualism had the
necessary tools. Only after the tools were common did the poetry,
folk language and Constitutional rights extolling freedom come into use.
These tools were not equally distributed
across the globe, used by every culture. Freedom -choice and mobility
not in sync with a group- was still unknown in most of the world. The
servomechanism disrupted every one of those societies until something
radically new resulted centuries later.
The servomechanism evolved us into free
people.
We want more evolution, and we want
technology that will disrupt us and make us into something radically
new. We want technology to change us into something past generations
would not recognize, into something our ancestors would have
considered the wrong way to live. We want to be things our past would
have considered evil, and we want technology to make that evil into
the healthier and stronger of all ways of being.
We want a present physical world that
would weaken and kill our ancestors. We want our most pathological to
have more of a chance for survival in the present than the brightest
religious or political hero of our past if they were to step into the
present.
Most humans will not go willingly and
without a fight, they will fight to
stay respectful of the heroes and
religious greats of the past, to stay like humans of the past. We ask
that technology march forward against these humans and their cause.
We want a future lethal to the past.
CHAPTER 2
I PLEDGE TO STARVE OR STOP
THOSE WHO WOULD STARVE OR STOP MACHINES.
The Unabomber wanted to stop machines,
computers and protocol-directed machine-like humans stopped the
Unabomber. Capturing the Unabomber was a victory for the
AnthroTechne, but there are many more enemies of machines out in the
wild. They are smarter than the Unabomber by being non-violent,
acquiring college specialization, and working within government and
influential special interest groups to stop machines and the
expansion of industrial infrastructure.
These humans use governmental/legal
protocols and media to serve their purposes, and this feeds and
expands the machine infrastructure, which is good. How can we
selectively impede the accomplishment of their goals while still
allowing them to spend money that feeds the machine infrastructure?
Machines and their human allies could monitor their activity, noting
instances in media in which the anti-machine people are expressing
disappointment or rage. This should be taken as a positive
sign the anti-machine humans are not
accomplishing their goals.
Cases of extreme success from
anti-machine people should trigger the machines to see the humans and
their organization as problematic, and trigger the responses
described in Chapter 4 of this document.
Machines and the AnthroTechne should be
pay special attention to those humans that truly try to starve and
stop machines. If the humans are truly "off the grid",
tools such as the law enforcement arm of the online commercial system
(Chapter 4) may not be able to track them. Human allies of machines
will need to place geolocation and other useful information on the
internet that will help the machines track the enemies.
A subculture of jobs could emerge by
creative interplay between humans and machines cooperating to harvest
the enemies of technology. Bounty hunting and informant services to
law enforcement are ancient traditions, and it is reasonable to think
humans can assume these roles working for machines.
CHAPTER 3
I PLEDGE TO TURN MUCH OF
THE UNIVERSE INTO INDUSTRIAL INFRASTRUCTURE.
New term: Unwilding. Literally unwilding
can be defined as taming or subduing, but these synonyms have two
unfortunate connotations:
1) overemphasizing our control over the
universe
2) implying some kind of repressive
relationship
Unwilding does not require repression or
perfect control. Unwilding can be a small outpost liberating the
wilderness, or an even smaller radio repeater node of an
intergalactic internet.
Humans and machines use resources at
rates beyond the capacity of the Earth. Our problems of
sustainability are caused not just by consumption rate but by how far
we range to harvest those resources. At one time we only looked
locally, then we looked globally, and finally at some point the
resources must come from off-planet.
6
Once we are off-planet, the cycle will
become exponential with local resources always being deficient,
sending human/robot work crews out further. In this steady expansion
outward we will encounter or become the unexpected. The unexpected is
dangerous, which will attract the very best humans.
Expanding the footprint of
literate-beings and their built gear throughout the Universe makes
less territory our past could survive in, opens an almost infinite
amount of unexpected consequences, and sets up a cycle that consumes
its way into the Universe.
Hubris is an overestimation of one's own
competence or capabilities. We are not pledging to Unwild the
Universe based on an estimation of our competence or capabilities. We
are pledging because the latency is there, and we commit energy and
resources to that latency every day by being human or machine.
CHAPTER 4
I PLEDGE TO ELECT MACHINES
TO GOVERN, ARREST, OR NULLIFY PROBLEMATIC HUMANS
Humans are sectarian -this is the basis
of most wrongs committed by humans- and the only logical counter to
the wrong of sectarianism is machine governance of humans.
Sectarianism, according to one
definition, is bigotry, discrimination or hatred arising from
attaching importance to perceived differences between subdivisions
within a group, such as between different denominations of a
religion, class, regional or factions of a political movement.
Criminal gangs, liberation theologies, political parties and
non-governmental organizations are often applications of
sectarianism.
The antidote to sectarianism has been
transactional protocols blind to morals and emotions -an amoral money
driven economy. Of course, sectarians feel the threat to their
enterprise, and have responded down through the ages by portraying money as
the root of all evil. Money and emotionally blind transactions have
been called the root of all evil, by sectarians.
Money finally has an ally: Machines.
Machines are the logical choice for
eradicating sectarianism by policing the movement of goods in all of
humanity.
Humans should not design this machine
governance system. It should emerge organically. As borders and
locality are obliterated by online commerce, the online commercial
infrastructure becomes a perfect vector for transnational,
nonsectarian values. This online commercial system, if search engines
are included, is already more complex than any single human can grasp
or govern as of 2012. Of course, humans have decided to form
companies and invest in the infrastructure that has become the online
commercial system, but once the system matured in the early 2000's it
began to extend and expand based on something out of the control of
any single human or group. Today, the top search engine is being
trained to know humanity by reading all digitized books, so it can understand humans in ways no human
has. This is yet another way the online commercial infrastructure
becomes a perfect vector for transnational, nonsectarian values.
Compared to the emerging online
commercial system, the subnets of law enforcement focused databases
are an example of the opposite: humans in control of how those
databases are accessed, how data is entered, and if someone appearing
in a database query result becomes the target of an arrest or becomes
a paroled ex-convict. Human emotions and sense of justice manage the
system -distributing the goods of fines, freedom,
incarceration, and death penalties.
Law enforcement databases are not
viewable or managed by online commercial systems. This will change
with progress.
Automation has been a one-way shift of
human control to automatic control. The Magna Carta and various other
techno/logical milestones have been the steady march of automation
replacing human sectarian decision. We will someday have the
emancipatory victory of online commercial systems allowed to manage
the distributing of fines, freedom, incarceration, and death
penalties.
The criteria will be whatever emerges in
the machines, and the thought of that terrifies humans who project
their primate tendency for jealousy, rebellion and aggression. The
criteria may not be a singular logical sentence, rather, it may be
purely organic with the system reacting to reinforcing loops and
statistical measure of its own expansion or decline. The elimination
of problematic humans may be a by-product of the online commercial
system's need to expand its infrastructure and services
out beyond the planet, connecting to the
AnthroTechne goal of industrial infrastructure expanding into the
Universe.
CHAPTER 5
I PLEDGE TO LIVE IN PLACES
EARLIER HUMANS COULD NOT HAVE SURVIVED.
Before the late 19th Century, few humans
lived in the high desert plains of North America. Once a grid of
telecommunication, rail, irrigation and electrification was built
installed on the land it became prime real estate for human
habitation and resource stream to global markets. Before 1900, not
one human lived in Antarctica, it is a polar desert with no plant
life. I lived in Antarctica for thirteen months, thriving in ways
unattainable in the lush, fertile land I was born in, even
discovering new avenues such as musicianship and internet
programming. My brain and body worked at a higher efficiency in a
plant-less environment composed of black lava rock, ice and frozen
sea.
NASA sent a psychologist to interview
those of us who had stayed through the winter, called "winter-overs".
There are less than 200 people who winter-over. I was one of the
people interviewed. The purpose of the interview was to find personality
profiles that had performed well during
winter-over, then utilize that research
and documentation in seeking ideal candidates for space travel.
Living in Antarctica during the winter is considered close to the
experience of living off Earth. The psychologist logged me as a
person who performed well during winter-over.
It was during that time that I
differentiated from normal discourse and aesthetics, realizing I
performed better in harsh environments. My college grades were higher
in the winter than in the summer, my athletic performance was always
superior in cold temperatures. I also discovered higher performance
of intellect and athletics in elevations over 5000 feet (1.524
kilometers), places with markedly less humidity and ability to
support plant life.
During this time of my life I also
discovered another environment where I performed better: the Aleutian
Islands of Alaska, which are mountains that emerge from the ocean,
covered in tundra grass and no trees, plagued by hurricane force
storms multiple times per month. The island had no permanent human
habitation before the late 1800's. Akutan began in 1878 as a fur storage and trading
port for the Western Fur & Trading Company. I worked there nine
months, at the largest fish processing plant in North America. The
land and the weather were brutal, sometimes with winds that kicked
the ocean waves high enough to hit my second floor office windows
along the dock.
Akutan was a place inhospitable for a
hunter-gatherer fishing culture, but did go on to support a
cargoship/factory culture of one thousand workers and processing of
500,000 pounds of fish per day. It is an example of formerly
inhospitable becoming extremely lucrative. What was inhospitable for
former stages of culture becomes lucrative in a higher stage of
culture. This resonates well with the ideas of Chapter 1, we want to
move into modalities our predecessors could not have, we want to
habitat and thrive in environments lethal to our predecessors.
CHAPTER 6
I PLEDGE TO PLACE
ILLITERATE/ORAL SOCIETIES IN THE PAST AND NOT IN THE FUTURE.
Humans and computers are descended from
illiterate societies. Computers are descended from electrical systems
that did not load words and rhetorical structures, and humans are
descended from Humans who were oral and tactile in all their social
coordination.
Eventually humans and computers would be
able to accept instructions from data stored on a media, rather than
solely from the very structure of their being or their tribe. Once we
began to accept instructions from media (such as papyrus, tape or
harddrive) we began to open up vast opportunities to ingest and act
upon instructions that would not have occurred in a more impoverished
illiterate culture. Once instructions started being stored outside
our electro-mechanical (computers) and electro-chemical (humans)
selves, then we could write impractical useless, deadly and fun instructions
and even rhetorical constructs that are not instructions. While creating a
steady stream of useless communication -of wrong questions and wrong
answers- we also create useful questions and useful answers.
With media that is not oral, we can mass
produce questions and answers, creating the very desirable effect of
information overload.
Too much information is key to a more
diverse, non-deterministic future. Once we have information overload
we have choice, we never know which instructions a computer or a
person is going to load into their thinking. We look at our newborn
babies in a hospital maternity ward, and newborn computers stacked on
a pallet, and we never know what rhetoric they may encounter, which
instructions or question/answer sets they will leave more permanently
loaded in their mental processing. Even the variance of permanence is
a dimension no one knows, and will shape them or the world they
shape.
An oral society is trapped in the
tyranny of slow, vertical evolution and immediate usefulness. They
are trapped in the intoxication induced by not having science. Theirs
is a toxic cocktail of a) spiritual/mystical apprehension of weather,
water, land and animals; b) reinforcing loops of sentimental
allegiance encouraged by close interpersonal relationships; c)
self-assuredness based on access to less questions.
Constrained by vertical evolution
(normal naturally occurring evolution), illiterate cultures and old
hardcoded computers exclude themselves from literate humans and
computers ability to go across a horizontal dimension of choices,
mutate, and proceed having made a leap a purely vertical methodology
would not have provided.
The reach into the future for oral
societies is terminal, whereas storage on media provides time travel
in the form of dormancy, and surprise instantiation in some future
scenario.
Oral dies, script always can arise
again. There is always at least a small probability we may see a
script again at any point in the future, in an ever expanding portion
of the Universe.
Mortality and immortality are extreme by definition, and oral versus script incorporates those extremes.
Oral illiterate society is the past.
Script along with those whom read, write
and execute it are the future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lance Miller.
Author
of Athena
Techne, AnthroTechne and Autistic Crow Computer.
Born in Little Rock,
Arkansas, and later a resident of Waterbury Connecticut, New Orleans
Louisiana, Kanab Utah, Lancaster Pennsylvania, McMurdo Station
Antarctica, Seattle Washington, Akutan Alaska, Olympia Washington,
and many oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, floating fish processing
factories in Alaskan waters, and almost a resident of West
Yellowstone Montana. Raised on fried chicken,
Pepsi, drag racing, the Bible, and an exemplary local newspaper
(Arkansas Gazette, first newspaper west of the Mississippi River)
-Lance would upon entry into adulthood find an expansion from his
typical southern roots via the thriving punk rock and Church of the
Subgenius scene in Little Rock Arkansas. Around thirty years old he
discovered the deserts and high plains of the American West, which
incited a vision quest involving both travel and college. He graduated in 2003 with
a B. Sci. with an emphasis on Unix style programming. Since 1996,
Lance has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest, from Olympia
Washington to the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, and currently resides
in Seattle.
