A Dream in August

The August God drew the blade from its sheath and moved towards the wolves. The man who was Wàngjì found himself breathing very heavily. To weep in front of the God-King was to show weakness in the presence of the highest order. He did not avert his eyes.

There were throngs of people on the hill; senators, retainers, priests, their robes flowing in the breeze, their jewels shining in the golden sun. No one spoke. The blade flashed and the first of the wolves fell. The remaining two sat on the grass, panting. They had not seen, or did not understand. The hand of the God showed neither mercy nor hatred, for he was beyond men. When the three wolves lay motionless, he turned to the man on the hill. The man was shaking. He was tall, and heavily muscled, and his hair was long. He was a fine specimen of man, but there was a great fear in his eyes. He bowed his head.

The blade flashed, slicing off the top of the man’s scalp, sparing the brain. There was a short silence, and then the man jerked back with a scream. He would not have a quick death. Quickly the August God moved, catching the man’s face in his hand, carving off his lips and nose with the blade. The screams were constant now, and blood began to run down the hill. The man who was Wàngjì felt his stomach turn, his heart pound in his chest. Slowly he rose to his feet, gathering his robes.

The End of Materialism

And having food and clothing, with these we shall be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

-I Timothy 6: 8-10

As I mentioned in a previous post, we’re beginning to see a new economic paradigm emerging in the free-data environment of the internet. As expected, it’s meeting with resistance in many forms. Intellectual property is a common subject brought up in discussions of copyright in the digital age; the joke is that the only true argument against information freedom applies only within the monetary economy that information freedom is trying to transcend! Intellectual property is first and foremost a concept created to protect private wealth (primarily of corporations) based on information. Ideas have monetary value, and must therefore be protected within a capitalist economy. In a post-scarcity/trans-monetary economy there is neither monetary value nor private wealth, and concepts of intellectual property are not only impossible to uphold, but a hindrance to progress.

The Inevitability of Trans-Monetary Economics

Western civilization is now crowing over the fact that the only opposition it ever had…has now collapsed upon itself. There should be no congratulation in that, because the contradictions which undid Marxism lie in wait to undo this society as well.

-Terence McKenna

Ever since watching “Zeitgeist: Moving Forward” (and completely disagreeing with its proposed solution), I’ve felt that it’s only a matter of time before monetary economics will collapse entirely, paving the way for an entirely new economic paradigm. I was seeing glimpses of it everywhere, from Napster’s copyright revolution and sites like FreeCycle and CouchSurfing, to Creative Commons licensing and the free software movement, to the Economics 2.0 of Charles Stross’ brilliant fiction.

Now it’s beginning to become clear. We’ve seen what happened to the concept of copyright when applied to digital information – a cornerstone of capitalism eroded overnight, dissolved by concepts completely beyond the scope of the system. Capitalism has no answer for resources that are infinitely replicable and infinitely abundant; it is a system based on supply and demand, of scarcity-based values. What we’re seeing with the arrival of the internet is the self-manifestation of a post-capitalist economic system that transcends all existing economic paradigms. Though it may seem to resemble communism at first glance, communism was a system designed to allocate finite resources – it was the “other answer” to scarcity. What we’re seeing now is not a system designed to deal with scarcity, but one that is arising in response to post-scarcity. It transcends and includes the ideals of both capitalism and communism, exceeding the goals of both.

When nanoscale 3-D printing becomes commonplace, physical information (matter) will be in the same arena as digital information. The implications of this are profound. The revolution that began with the internet will completely depose our current economic systems when it applies to the physical sphere. What will be the worth of paper bills when they can be replicated exactly? What will be the worth of gold when it can be assembled out of atoms in air? What will be the worth of money when the things it buys can be infinitely replicated?

Or, a much more interesting question: what things can hold value in a post-scarcity economy? And how will we determine their value?

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See also:

The End of Materialism

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Jazzanova – Soon [ft. Vikter Duplaix] || 2002/In Between

The Gift

When they separate the mind from the body and thus gain immortality, they will look back on all of those who came before them with a new-found respect. These people had to die. They’re gone forever.

And yet death is a gift: for if we’d had eternal life, would we have tried so hard to create something worth remembering?

A day will come when death becomes a choice rather than an inevitability. That day will owe its existence to every one of us who lived with death in our lives.

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Jay Electronica – Eternal Sunshine || 2008/Act 1: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge)

The Humanity Archive

Over the following millennia, provided that humanity does not self-extinguish, the human race will develop technologies with the potential to completely transform the human being. Genomics, cybernetics, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, space colonization, and countless other developing technologies, along with the exponential evolution of human culture and society, have the potential to leave humans without many of the essential traits we now associate with humanity.

It may come to pass that the majority of the human body will consist of artificial components. It may be that human society takes on characteristics of a superorganism, with all individuals assuming efficient roles. Humans may eventually link with an internet-like entity, living in constant interaction with the digital; that, or virtual reality may largely replace physical reality. AI may assume equal status with (or surpass) human beings, humans may no longer mate biologically, emotions could be suppressed or artificially controlled, intelligence could be amplified, lifetimes could be extended – the list continues.