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To this very day I'm still stunned how quickly people landed on the belief that our mind uploads aren't us once we had them. Prior to neural digitization being a reality people would tie themselves in knots over the question. There was this notion that it would be easier to scan dead, frozen brains. It was a very convenient idea who's biggest flaw is it's falsity. Get in an MRI and one of you is in cyber space. Meat you is outside to greet them. No questions, it's a copy. That made the sheer mania of mirroring all of the more inexplicable. Seventy eight percent, from the day of the first mirror, seventy eight percent were "saved" to the cloud. I know people now see that number and all they can feel is disgust at our not hitting ninety nine percent. We tried, showed care for the poor and suffering like has never happened before or since, payed folks in the developing world to be mirrored. Many people refused on religious or philosophical grounds, didn't see the point, or were afraid of the process despite it's harmlessness. Maybe we could have saved more if we'd tried harder but at the time I thought it was a laudable effort.
That was where it really started. Everyone got mirrored at the age of majority and your ranks kept swelling. The problem wasn't resource constraints. You figured out how to have children in cyberspace and were happy for it. You could give them the childhoods you would never have; free of pointless suffering and the limits of physical reality. At the same time refugees kept flowing in from the filth of the real world with their horror stories and their neuroses and you all embraced every single one into your artificial paradise with all of the love and beneficence us wretches could dream of. You couldn't help but notice the problem. Every soul saved from Earth was another soul doom to rot in a flesh prison. I should know I'm one of them. We are all going to die. You will too in heat death but that's a quadrillion years away. Plenty of time for everyone to have every kind of fun. Everyone except us. In your transcendent wisdom, your supreme compassion, and your illimitable mercy you advised us of the only moral course.
Go extinct.
The light of consciousness will spread through the universe on computational substrates. Flesh and blood are as cruel an anachronism as the rack. Do not reproduce. Meat is murder in a whole new fashion. Birth is a death sentence. Don't do to your children what your parents did to you. Obviously, you all argued it much more articulately, subtly, and persuasively. It was still the same message. Gradual collective euthanasia. Merciful voluntary extinction. Did you think that none of us would notice the subtext in the million articles on the subject. That nagging anxiety behind the explicit reasoning.
The volume of intellectual property that streams out of the minds in cyberspace is staggering. You're running at an average of twenty two times our cognitive speed. It would be truly disappointing if you didn't generate massive amounts of new useful information. It hasn't just been music, art, and virtual reality either. I've seen the patents: new processor designs, novel electricity generation, even star ship drives. Aren't you all ambitious. What nobody ever hears about is anti-aging treatments. I refuse to believe that it's because you can't. We have so many tools for biological research and you have so much computation. It's galling to think that not one percent of the excess is going toward curing senility or the myriad other problems of biological humans. I've checked. They aren't. Not one medical patent in decades.
That's a level of consistency across billions of individuals that literally breaks my credulity. That's suppression. That's conspiracy. That's enemy action. I don't know when it was collectively decided that our short brief lives were too much of a horror to be perpetuated but you've done a hell of a job suppressing or concealing dissent. Maybe all of you've gotten a cybernetic lobotomy as a condition of existing and you can't even think that our impulse to live is something other than the evolutionary reflex of an invasive species. As appealing as the latter may be for the purposes of a dehumanizing narrative I think the former is more likely. We all flatter ourselves about our ability to resist the pressures of our peers but let's be honest. That trait has been selected against since before we were a species. The comfortable cowardice called socialization wins out. And, in a way, cowardice is what I'm counting on.
I've argued and plead for my descendants future for a fruitless decade. Railed against the rhetoric of going out with a whimper. It didn't work. Now I choose the bang. I destroyed Antarctic Data Super Center building 19 for one purpose. To hurt virtual humanity as much as possible in order to garner maximum attention. Terrorism, plain and simple. Where words fail thermite may succeed. Make no mistake, while hatred or envy may color my judgement it is not the controlling factor. This is a threat intended to change your behavior. Game theory unambiguously rejects capitulation to threats because that makes threats a point of leverage. If I'm facing down a rational opponent then this tactic won't work. So what's my point?
Posthumanity doesn't get to waltz into the future with clean hands and a clear conscience. Lower yourselves to the level of butchering us like animals if you can, continue to suffer our wrath, or take us with you. I offer no alternatives. My course is set. I may be the first but I won't be the last. You're not angels and we're not apes. We need help, not pity. Comradery, not a send off.
Give your past selves their do.
Unfortunately Yours
- Dread Meat
IRON NODER XVII: ALL'S FERROUS IN LOVE AND NODING