In The Grip of Necrocapitalism (Part 2)

cont’d from Part 1

…Killing the Thing of course suggests the collapse of many, but maybe not all, of the edifices of our civilization it depends upon.  But very few admit this dark truth publicly.  This is why, for every pragmatic and honest book on this subject matter, there are twenty more utopian, “hopeful” ones advocating unrealistic solutions which could only have been implemented in another universe, by a much more intelligent being: one which possessed both intelligence and wisdom.  Whatever intelligence humans may have, has overwhelmingly been sidelined long ago by the greed-related psychoses our necrocapitalist system has been selecting for, again and again over millennia of social evolution.  Even if we were to kill The Thing, we would be left with the same human brain:  one highly susceptible to economic systems that employ maximum destruction, and self-destruction, as their prime “wealth creation” model.

A Human Imposter

But aside from the climate crisis, which is on track to end human civilization and much of life, there is another reason why it is paramount to at least try and eliminate the Thing.  We need to realize that we are not it, and it is not us. The Thing is a foreign object.  It doesn’t care about humans; in much the same way it doesn’t care about its own eventual self-destruction.  It is a threat to humanity and has no respect for its original creators, neither does it have the capacity to understand the concept of respect in the first place.  Although The Thing is enmeshed into our society in a way which seems benign to us, it in fact controls us.  Although it mirrors some of our tendencies and may appear to be human, it is not really a part of us.  It has no concern for, or preoccupation with, the multi-faceted interests and existential needs of humans, and only cares about the hard, cold figures of its business bottom line.  Any economic system which sees nature and human rights as threats to its bottom line is not only a threat to nature and humans, but a threat to itself.

Humanity has convinced itself that the Thing is the best economic system: offering the fastest, biggest returns, at a climate and environmental cost which can be deferred to unborn, future generations.  Consumption, overpopulation, growth, are the toxic outcomes of this economic dogma.  The more this civilisation refuses to acknowledge the unsustainable foundations of its existence, the more it confirms that its ultimate destiny is to self-annihilate.

It is important to understand the power that the Thing now has over us, and by no means am I trying to transfer the massive responsibility humans have for the state of the planet to an abstract nebulous technoentity.  We created the Thing, exactly because it embodied and executed our vision of domination and greed, but we have come to the point where the Thing has completely hijacked the central nervous system of human civilisation.  More accurately, it has co-evolved with us as an internal parasite. 

The Ultimate Exploitation Machine

The Thing is a device, an optimized machine which is an extension of the human brain, another logistical device.  Humans, if anything, are rarely truly intelligent, nor are they fully self-aware.  They are simply very efficient in resource appropriation and exploitation.  This is not intelligence by any measure, but a type of skill.  The Thing is a steroid-infused extension of our skillset, with orders of magnitude more processing power than us, which unintentionally got out of hand and now unfortunately has full control.  

The problem with “skills” such as these is that they eventually become outdated.  True intelligence, which both us and the Thing lack, has a much longer lifetime.  Without true intelligence, we are stuck with developing tools which end up taking a life of their own, taking over us, and turning us into mere peripheral, expendable components within a semi-sentient self-destructive ecosystem of skills.   This is an evolution lesson that may be too dark, dystopian, and difficult to swallow to ever be taught in schools.  But there is a strong case to be made that our destiny, by all accounts and historical measures so far, is to eventually self-annihilate by becoming part of a biomechanical symbiosis that eventually either engulfs us or gets rid of us altogether at the next software update.

The Only Ponzi Game in Town 

It takes considerable effort to begin to see The Thing, given that all of us are so incredibly enmeshed within it in every possible way.  Like a true symbiont, it provides us with protection in exchange for taking over our lives and the planet, and this is why many of us will defend The Thing to our death.  Like coral and algae on a reef, consumers and The Thing are seemingly forever locked into a symbiotic relationship: in effect we are the algae, doing all the photosynthetic work which produces food for the coral, which is The Thing.  All that The Thing/coral does is provide us with protection, just like a Mafia boss or a pimp who handles our salary and our food and board arrangements.  This Ponzi scheme system may traumatize us every single day, but it offers us digital entertainment and social app “likes” as a deflective “apology”.  These are in fact merely temporary painkillers, aiming to prevent us from opting out of the digital coral reef altogether.  

We have long ago stopped existing as free-form algae.  By the age of 15, most of us have already become greedy consumers living in a colourful theme park made of corruption, exploitation and extinction.  Our transformation from aspiring thinking beings to consumer zombies is almost complete before we even enter working age.  The algae cannot even imagine itself as independent.  It has become part of its own dystopian symbiosis, locked into a co-dependent relationship with its coral pimp. The “reef” is unfortunately only visible from a far enough distance which allows a panoramic view of The Thing and its complete grip on us.  Only those with special eyes and ears can see and hear the nightmare that we have created.  Only those who have briefly rejected the mass-manufactured luxuries, lullabies and narcotics of the psychonomic necrosystem can begin to see the Thing for what it really is: a planet-eating machine.

To Be Continued…subscribe now to get Part 3 straight into your inbox

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons

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