Living virtually
Jennifer Bilek talks about gender ideology as corporate fiction:
The creation of this corporate fiction is one step toward attempting to overlay a virtual reality onto the natural world and to construct a religion out of technology. Elites at the highest levels of our technocracy have been speaking about technologies so advanced that they provide us with god-like qualities for at least fifty years, probably longer.
Ring a bell? Sound like Elon Musk at all with his cheery plans to move humans to Mars?
The current iteration of this ideology, established by the technocracy we live in, is meant to ensconce us in a virtual or cyber world to which the natural world is subjugated. With its massive propaganda apparatus, it has only taken a decade to convince the populace that there is a unique type of human, untethered to the biosphere like the rest of us, mere “biological people.”
Let’s just put the magic helmet on and spend the rest of our lives dreaming.
Corporations, banks, international investment houses, governments, legal institutions, and influential non-governmental organizations (NGOs) market the idea that we are not a sexually dimorphic species. They don’t care about the identity issues of a minuscule part of the population. It is patently ridiculous to think so. They are marketing disembodiment. “Gender,” currently being promoted as a revolutionary human rights movement to set us free, is an industry posing as social progress for the people. It seeks to deconstruct human reproductive sex for profit and human engineering. It is posited that our freedom will emerge when technology takes over where human reproduction ends. When this purported dead weight of human reproduction ends, male & female will be obsolete. We can then live as our “authentic selves” beyond male and female, youth and adult, beyond material existence and its limitations.
I know little or nothing about this but it’s an interesting thought. It sounds like Avatar. I found Avatar extremely creepy and gruesome, a geeky boys’ fantasy run amok. Yay we can sit comfortably on flying horses without being snapped off by physical forces because it’s all just a video game we live in forever. Who the hell wants to?
Maybe the gender-is-magic people do.
The male sexual fetish of transsexualism, a compulsion to own female biology for oneself, has been rebranded to “transgenderism” because a male fetish would be a tough sell to any population. “Transgender” sounds cool and edgy & feels mutinous for teens filled with the rebellious spirit of youth who are clueless about the repercussions of being sterilized by the drugs & surgeries being marketed to them. Claiming synthetic sex, a corporately manufactured illusion, has become the medical-tech generation’s counterpart to getting a secret tattoo. These kids adopting synthetic sex identities have grown up online with cyber identities & have had their personalities medicalized since they were old enough to talk, while previous generations were out exploring the real world.
It sounds horribly plausible, doesn’t it.
Technocratic elites have spent years discussing the virtual reality they seek to create. We will be enclosed and connected to everything and everyone else via bodiless minds without any roots in the biosphere. Elon Musk promotes his Neuralink, Ray Kurzweil, a Singularity, Martine Rothblatt’s Terasem movement, and Lifenaut organizations tout immortality in cyberspace. Mark Zuckerberg promises a utopia in his Metaverse, and Yuval Harari’s technological god will rid us of the cumbersome world of nature for something much more significant. Elites and corporations are investing in humans framed as otherworldly and not like the rest of us, rooted in biology, because they see profits and believe this is our future. The fascination of elites in “gender ideology” takes on a new light when seen in context.
A lurid new light. To repeat, I know little or nothing about this, but I think there’s at least something to it. It’s pretty grim.
Taking a cue from this, I went online and bought from some bloke a pizza parlour on Mars; going cheap. Naturally, he wanted my bankcard details, which I was only too happy to send to him via Facebook, Twitter or one of those. I am pretty sure nobody can just wander in and access those details without clearing it first with Elon Musk or Jerry Zuckerberg or whoever. So all should be well. Anyone for a slice of genuine Martian pizza?
lol
Pshaw. We know that your Martian “pizza parlor” is just a front for libtard controlled s#%{x slave basement breeding farms providing willing partners available in any one of the 25 different genders we don’t even have names for! i have already placed my order for a geriatric blue furred Venusian hermaphroditic dragon
Blue furred? But don’t you just love the lilac fur?
I don’t know how anyone in 2022 can believe in techno-utopia, when we all KNOW now that the batteries are never good enough, it’s impossible to get rid of ads and spam, and here in Europe it all slows to a crawl every afternoon when the Americans wake up.
If you believe in techno-utopia, I have an NFT of a bridge to sell to you.
I can imagine nothing more significant than to be rooted in, and having arisen from and into the world of nature. Darwin stumbled across something incredibly profound in discovering our kinship with the rest of living nature. There is indeed grandeur in this view of life, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. The technocrats have decided to give up their birthright for a mess of pottage; I’m not keen on them taking the rest of everything down with them. I am happy to be a grubby little animal, descendant of billions of years worth of other grubby little animals.
Humans have a tendency to make gods in their own image, then try to cover their tracks and reverse the causality by saying that the gods create humans in their own image. It seems like these technocrats have decided to save time by skipping the middleman altogether by just having it done with and declaring themselves to be gods. This disembodied future is portrayed as both good and inevitable. I don’t think it’s either. I’m no vitalist, but I don’t think the biological substrate upon which our awareness and conciousness are based is simply an incidental feature that can be replaced willy-nilly in a test tube or an electronics bench. I’m a materialist, but I don’t think the human brain (or any brain for that matter) is simply a meat computer running a mind as software, and that if we can just build the right recepticle into which we can dump our minds, we’ll all live happily ever after. Or at least until the batteries run down. I don’t thin it’s possible. If it is, I don’t think we should.
We don’t know enough about how things work to know how to replace them artificially. Those of us here have read a number of comments by iknklast noting the lack of success she encountered in trying to rebuild and relocate a small bit of habitat. You can’t build an ecosystem from scratch. I don’t think you can build a brain, either. The hopes of the technocrats to cheat death by “uploading” their conciousness is a pipe dream. Forcing it onto the rest of us is a pipe nightmare.
As for genetic manipulation, again our ability to do things outstrips our wisdom to do them well, or perhaps to not do them at all. Just because we are able to do something doesn’t mean we should. I don’t trust us enough to know when to leave well enough alone. Not all changes are improvements. I don’t think we have the foresight or segacity to choose wisely when it comes to this.
Our current civilzation has brought us to the brink of planetary disaster in a frighteningly short span of time. Our blunders and missteps now have global consequences. I would not trust the power of imortality with a species so manifestly reckless, a species unable or unwilling to deal with its current situation, which is entirely of its own making. Neither unwillingness nor inability speak well to the uses to which we would put immortality. If it was framed in terms of a job interview, I wouldn’t trust them with the respnsibility. It would be like hiring someone to juggle fire torches on the Hindenburg. Bristlecone pines, Bowhead whales, Greenland sharks; those beings I would trust with immortality. They’ve already demonstrated responsible use of lifespans much greater than ours. They have earned it. We have not. We are so busy shovelling other species into the fires of oblivion that we can’t see that we are one of those species too. We are bound to this Earth in ways we’ve not yet come to understand. Our Earthly, material existence is not a burden, it is a privilege. The technocrats have replaced the religious yearning for an uncertain (yet devoutly wished for) Eternity in Heaven for an equally illusory future of disembodied eternity of their own design. They are the gods building a heaven for themselves.
The Promethian task now is not to steal fire from the gods to give it to humans, but to take fire away from humans who believe they are gods. Or, to look at it from the perspective of another culture’s fire-stealer, Raven is a trickster; and the joke is on us.
I might have mentioned this here before, but what the heck…I read the essay linked below during a period when I was doing a lot of rail commuting, and often waiting at a particularly unpleasant (at the time) busy crowded station for trains that were often late, sometimes very late. I remember jokingly telling people I was fine as long as I had a laptop, headphones, free wifi and a bag of fast food; I could contentedly watch a movie and eat junk for hours. But after I read this essay, this was no longer acceptable–I had the sudden realisation, ‘what kind of life is this?’
http://dev.autonomedia.org/node/3904
It sounds more like the opposite of the film Avatar. The science & technology military corporate humans were the Bad Guys; the we’re-all- one-with-Nature Spiritual indigenous people were the Good Guys. The planet was real. It sounds to me more like the sort of reality people who play video games would see as plausible. Not Avatar, but avatars. The line between you and the character you inhabit during your most exciting moments is distinctly blurred. More than one essay has linked the growth of transgender identities to RPGs.
YNNB #8
“As for genetic manipulation, again our ability to do things outstrips our wisdom to do them well”
Robert Heinlein actually suggested a way to do it cautiously enough to be considered wise, in an early novel “Beyond This Horizon”. It is set in a society that has had genetic engineering techniques for centuries. After some early misuse, the society has decided that the only techniques to be used (at least on humans) is for the parents to decide which half of their genomes will go into the child. Eg: a carrier of cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia would pick gametes that *don’t* have the defective gene. Also the choice is only available which genes which have an evident positive or negative effect, no picking eye color or curliness of hair.
See this for more discussion of the book & the ‘Heinlein Solution’
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2015/01/robert-heinlein-and-looking-beyond-this.html
Jim @#11:
(It’s complicated, I know.) But ‘genetic manipulation’ happens all the time. I don’t know all that much about the situation elsewhere, but here in Australia, and also NZ, there has been a remarkable drop in the frequency of Down Syndrome births. (See link below.)
“The researchers concluded that selective Down syndrome-related terminations have decreased the number of births with Down syndrome in Australia by 66% and 71% in New Zealand.”
This is a type of genetic engineering. Pregnant women are given as much information as technology can provide, and are then free to choose among the options within the bounds of possibility, and with the technology racing along as if in Formula 1.
https://www.massgeneral.org/news/press-release/impact-selective-terminations-birth-rate-population-levels-individuals-down-syndrome-australia-newzealand#:~:text=Between%202016%20and%202020%2C%20there,1%2C158%20births%20(fact%20sheet).
https://www.insideradiology.com.au/amniocentesis/