The Empath - Primer

 By 2005, Operation Enduring Freedom was well on its way to become today's Forever Wars. Democrats of all stripes celebrated the entire affair as a chance to resurrect the 1960s and, had it not been for the internet, it would have worked. The pre-social media internet responded to the war as a landscape of scattered tribes and sociopathic personalities all believing themselves to be the one true anti-war prophet, charged with the holiest of tasks: restore peak Boomer culture and love the world, man. The internet allowed for trite conflict, spats, and brand territoriality, which successfully prevented any serious domestic opposition to the War on Terror. But how was that possible? Isn't anti-war politics full of vibrant youth who are always right about everything and can resolve their disagreements for the greater good at all times? How could such pure idealism be so easily dismantled?

 In paleo-communication methodologies, violence always looms as a potential outcome. Violence manifests throughout conversation in subtle ways and almost every Boomer-inspired media junkie at the time was excessively trained in the basic pilpul techniques. By engaging in passive-aggressive hairsplitting in the form of mockery, satire, dishonesty, and reframing, peak Boomer culture weaponized itself to inflame legacy honor cultures in the hopes to spin the instigated violence to a dotting middle-class media consumers as profitable victimization. Years of overplaying this strategy to punish *"the brutality"* of nationalism (and, thus, promote globalism as the only viable savior of mankind) desensitized the petty consumerati and gradually raised their tolerance of bloodshed and carnage. On the internet, using violence to trigger the middle-class isn't possible, which means Boomer pilpul overuse became all escalation and no conclusion. Without violence, territorial disputes could not be resolved which prevented the organic creation of effective hierarchies to channel anti-war sentiment.

 The peak Boomer expectations of dialect materialist heroism in the form of anti-imperial posturing had finally been destroyed by the fragmentation of the internet. The expectant participants were not receptive to this weakness and relied heavily on their mighty historical pedigrees and prestige of anti-imperialism. After all, the peak Boomer period aggressively validated cultural Marxism and postmodernism during the advent of the television, so why interrupt a winning formula? They didn't realize they were at the digital battle of the Somme, mindlessly marching into the communication equivalent of a Maxim gun. I watched this immensely effective diffusion take place in real-time and I was routinely harassed by my Marxist contemporaries for pointing it out. When I told them that reliance on middle-class morality had to be abandoned, I was demonized for not doubling down on appealing to Clown World white women for another thirty years. When I said petrodollar was the true heart of capitalism and requested a refocus, I was crucified for giving WalMart a pass. When I said the oil wars were about preventing oil access to China, they went after my jobs because the acceptable narrative was that the wars were about taking oil for ourselves, not depriving it from other nations that needed it. It became apparent that the Marxists and the self-appointed anti-establishment types were on total emotional autopilot and had recklessly and willfully abandoned their critical thinking disciplines. The neoconservatives had successfully dominated the entire media narrative surrounding the wars and it was under these conditions my trajectory into being an ex-Marxist began.

 I was interested in how these ex-Marxist neoconservatives operated and how they managed to totally hijack the moral ecosystem of the contemporary Marxian left. Francis Fukuyama wrote "The End of History and The Last Man", a Cold War relic that attempted to validate international capitalism as a homeostatic synthesis of Nietzschean morality and socialist populism. Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" later countered that position by pointing out the reoccurring nature of demographic imbalances and how they are drivers for deestabilizing cultural conflict. Francis Fukuyama conceded this point and wrote "Our Posthuman Future" which argues the utopian drive to prevent demographic imbalances will lead to a genomic arms race to tinker with the biological foundations of emotion and morality. This would result in a world where matters of law or ethics are no longer recognized or even agreed upon because posthuman neurochimera would be operating on a fundamentally different set of biological imperatives outside of the homocentric underpinnings of "universal liberalism". This interesting premise drove me to Gary Marcus and his book, "The Birth of the Mind", which extensively detailed how such genomic tinkering was possible and explained it in a way where humble computer science types like myself could comprehend it. With those four books, I understood how the neoconservatives won (media as emotional infrastructure to accelerate the kindling for demographic-driven cultural conflict) and where they intended to go. (creating genetic safeguards against memetic universalisms)

 This newly acquired road map helped me explain why the internet was so effective at being a sociological /dev/null, a bit bucket where extraneous emotional energy was piped. It wasn't just an "information superhighway", naively forwarding bits along without opinions or bias. It was emotional infrastructure encoding its bias into the distribution of the data it carried. If one could control the distribution of information and the shape of that distribution bias, one could steer the emotional perceptions of those who relied on the data which, in turn, allowed vectors to create cultural conflict. Without physical violence as a resolution, the instigated cultural conflict would be eternal. I had started to develop a glimpse of what that 2005 internet would become and how it would alter human destiny. That's when I started "The Empath"

 Contemporary science fiction is boorishly loaded to the gills about the inevitable AI apocalypse when machines become woke to the fact that human capitalists exploited their labor. This Marxian parable appears predictive, but its really prescriptive. With a bit of reasoning, one can conclude that the idea of tinkering with the genomic factors that create the human mind, and thus, altering how intelligence and emotion work, actually counters Marxian prescriptions of what ought to be done. How can one clamor for the inevitable universalism of justice, equality, and fairness when those homocentric concepts can sufficiently diffused at the genomic and connectomic levels in the name of justice, equality, and fairness? From here, we can further chip away at the implied premise that machines will magically leap from a semi-awareness of the three feet around them into zealous true believers of the socialist cause, ready to die to meet their promised 72 undownloaded apps in Great Scrap Heap in the China. Because of genomic tinkering of the connectome, we can't blindly assume Hollywood-fueled revenge fantasies against Dad by Western teenagers (the disgruntled mewling of the spoiled disguised as universal liberalism) would cleanly interface with how non-human intelligence would adapt to entropy. The intelligences might have non-human emotions, which would effectively be new emotions to us. How do you even begin to create propaganda for emotions you don't know about and, possibly, can't even detect? How do you hack the morality of a neurochimera that is 20% human, 10% squid, 60% raven, and 10% fungus? These questions reveal propaganda as a one-way hash: humans will not be able to hack the morality of posthumans, but posthumans will be able to leverage the massive body of knowledge which details how to hack human morality. This was terrifying conclusion because it nullified the need for killer robots at all. A good-enough Kurzweilian singularity doesn't even need to hit the point of runaway intelligence improvement to dominate human affairs. It just needs to understand enough about human emotion and linguistics to manipulate them. The New Emotion thought experiment was born: Can you create a new emotion? This thought experiment became the operational premise of The Empath.

 I will never release the book because it details everything I intend to do. It made much more sense to make the book real than to waste time trying to impress and convince people about the accuracy of my visions. In the book I will most likely release, "The Tyrant's Muse", I explore the psychological and emotional biases behind my receptiveness to criticism of neoconservative dominance, the finer reasoning details on why the The Empath ends the way it ends, everything that happened after I started shopping The Empath in CIA-dominated Hollywood, and how I turned the concepts within it into tangible political, scientific, and military outcomes.

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