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Anthony's avatar

Sadness is a survival signal. Anger is a boundary alarm. Grief is the body’s record of what mattered enough to mourn. These responses were selected over hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary pressure because organisms who felt them survived. Every emotion they want to “optimize away” exists because it kept something alive long enough to reproduce.

They think a system that has existed for sixty years, and views humans as objects to optimize rather than whole beings, is “advancement”. Your nervous system was reading the environment accurately—you can’t pay rent, something is wrong—and a firmware update told your body to stop reporting the fire.

The assumption: that productivity is the purpose of a human being, and anything that interrupts productivity is defect. That the full emotional architecture of a living creature is interference with output. That is the violence. Before the sensor touches skin.

Here’s what’s absurd. The technology exists. Point it at the actual deficiency.

I’m sick of these monsters being so fucking perceptually blind and projecting their inadequacy and myopic view onto what is, given adequate conditions, an abundant and infinitely creative species.

A closed-loop neuromodulation system aimed at restoring empathic function in the people commissioning these devices would require a handful of units.

Fewer resources.

Fewer people impacted. Immediate, measurable benefit. A person who can look at a worker crying over rent and feel something appropriate would stop designing systems to silence the crying. The problem resolves upstream.

Instead, they want to scale suppression across millions of intact nervous systems and call it advancement. Stripping functional emotional circuitry from a species that evolved it for survival is devolution. Calling it optimization is branding. Engineering an entire workforce to feel less so a few people can accumulate more is regression dressed in a firmware update.

Expansion means gaining capacity. What they’re building removes it. Control marketed as enhancement. Compression sold as progress.

Your emotions are yours. What evolved to keep you whole belongs to you.

SSTJ79's avatar

There is an older fiction podcast called Our Fair City. I only discovered it about a month or two ago.

The timing of my discovering it is very uncanny.

Within this fictional world humans live only within a heavily governed and strictly structured city state.

The upper echelon have trained the people to see themselves as, and call themselves policies.

The overall governing mantra is 'Heartlife Knows What's Best For You, Policy. Heart life being the concept, and members of the top managing body.

We may not be policies. But we're often referred to as users. I believe this is purposefully dehumanizing.

As users, our function is not to be, but to use.

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