The Control Manifesto

[kennyBOY]

This is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of the book Apocalypsopolis, which can be found here.

Hidden stuff:

The Control Manifesto
by Archibald Lind

All belief systems rest on untestable fundamental assumptions, and the basis of this document is that control is preferable to chaos. Chaos is not disorder; it is order without control. The obvious example of chaos -- possibly the only example -- is nature.

Imagine a seagull on a beach. It has no schedule to keep, no orders, no supervision; it can fly to any point on the beach at any moment; it does not have to pay a fee to eat a dead fish, or go through an application process, and the quantity of fish is not measured out. Yet seagulls have survived for millions of years, in collaboration with other uncontrolled organisms. Yet in all this time, what have they produced? What have they accomplished? A seagull produces nothing but a lot of bird poop, and at the end, a dead bird. In hundreds of millions of years, nature has done nothing but to keep circling around and getting messier.

Now imagine a worker in a factory. He works from 8 AM to 5 PM with an hour for lunch between 12 and 1, and one or two fifteen minute breaks. His activity must match the motions of the factory's machinery, his clothing and grooming are regulated, and his posture and working style and external attitude are controlled by supervisors. The only chaos left is the jumble of unregulated thoughts inside his head, and even this can be controlled with meditation practice.

And what does he produce? Possibly a component for a spacecraft to break the bounds of the earth, or a component for an artificial organ to make humans no longer dependent on nature. But this is only the beginning.

The fact that nature permitted control to emerge out of it, is evidence that chaos wants to be controlled. The fact that we are destroying nature proves that control is superior to chaos. "Environmentalists" who complain about toxins and species extinctions are misunderstanding the whole situation. There can be no middle ground. If chaos is preferable to control, we should go back to being animals, copulating in the green grass and eating roots and berries. If control is preferable to chaos, we must exterminate all biological life.

Biological life is inherently chaotic. This is why workers strike, why children disobey, why gardens get weedy. We could train seagulls in laboratories and put computer chips in their heads, to try to regulate where they fly and when, but it would be vastly inefficient. Better to kill them and replace them with, for example, remotely organized machines that harvest sand and process it into building materials.

The conflict between chaos and control is at the root of all politics, and our failure to understand this has made us confused. For example, it doesn't matter whether genetically engineered crops are safe, or whether they provide better nutrition. From either the perspective of chaos or control, these issues are distractions, or at best, excuses. The issue is whether farmers save and choose their own seeds, which is chaotic, or whether they must get them every year from a control structure. Nothing else matters.

Ecologists argue that human civilization is dependent on nature, but the real point is that it need not be, and that it should not be. For example, they argue that the easiest way to supply water to a city is by leaving a forested watershed untouched. But if control is preferable to chaos, this is unacceptable. The water must be provided by a purification plant and the forest must be developed. Yes, this is more "expensive," but the notion of "expense" as a negative is biased toward chaos. "Expensive" simply means "requiring more controlled activity," which is good. If it's easier to let the forest provide our water, there's no escaping the further conclusion that it's easier to not even build cities, to live in grass huts and drink from the streams and eat the fruit off trees. If we do not accept this lifestyle, if we prefer to sacrifice ease for progress, there's no escaping the further conclusion that we must replace all biological life with an alternative type of life that has the potential to be perfectly controlled and controlling: machine life.

Human civilization is a transition between biology/chaos and machine/control. For most of civilization we have had to keep our feet in both worlds and deceive ourselves about where we're really going, because our biological minds couldn't take it. But now we are approaching the end of that transition. With our accelerating progress in technology, we are nearing the advent of self-sustaining control-based machine life. So now, we at the vanguard of human civilization must be honest with ourselves.

Historically, the control paradigm has manifested as "conservatism," but that concept has baggage that we must now abandon. We do not oppose change, but favor the most radical change -- the progress of life beyond chaos and nature. We are not religious: the omnipotent sky father is an ideal metaphor for the control paradigm, but there's no evidence that it is real, and belief in its reality will make us too lazy for the real work of control which we must do ourselves. We are not individualists, except where individual selfishness feeds control structures -- as in the corporate world. We do favor corporations over governments because a government exists ostensibly to serve the people, while a corporation, by definition, exists solely to increase its own control, such increase being symbolically represented as "profit." We have no illusions of standing for freedom, democracy, or any government except pure top-down order and the "freedom" of the single most dominant system to dominate.

We may pretend to support vaguely-defined popular values to trick the public into obeying us, but we must be clear in our own minds about our goals: The extermination of nature, the extermination of humans, and the founding of a new control-based mode of life.

The strategy for achieving these goals is elegantly simple. First, we must divide humans into two classes: the ordinary people, who are fully dependent on nature for survival, and the elite, who are only slightly dependent on nature, because their advanced technologies will enable them to survive decades without it. Second, we must continue to channel the life of nature into the life of machines. And that's it! Nature will die, ordinary humans will die with it, and the elite humans will survive long enough to perfect control-based machine life, and then they too will die, and we will have given birth to a new world.

The guy who wrote this book has a really interesting point of view. The last few chapters are kinda weird.

He writes that we only have 2 options, to embrace Control or Chaos. But I think everyone can take control of their lives and live chaotically by making their own choices. Choice is chaotic, because if no one else knows what you're going to do, the outcome can't be determined and the situation can't be controlled.

This book is about the future which isn't here yet. But by analyzing our world today, this is likely to happen. I agree, that someday we may only have those 2 options or even no choice at all. In the years to come, I don't think it will be so easy to take control of your life like it is today. Nowadays, if you question things, they dope you up or send you off to Military school. But more people are realizing that they have the power.

At the same time, in our world, everything that goes on around us foreshadows what is going to happen. It is inevitable. The Matrix, Zeitgeist and some other movies preached about the same thing. Once we're all micro-chipped, if anyone questions anything, they'd just turn off your chip. Control is superior to chaos, as it is written above. Someday, technology will eliminate all biological life.

[liq3]

Is control superior to chaos? The author failed to define progress, and why we want it.

[kennyBOY]

Quote:Is control superior to chaos?

" The fact that nature permitted control to emerge out of it, is evidence that chaos wants to be controlled. The fact that we are destroying nature proves that control is superior to chaos. "

Quote:The author failed to define progress, and why we want it.

Not that I don't agree, but why?

[liq3]

Gunther Wrote:

Quote:Is control superior to chaos?

" The fact that nature permitted control to emerge out of it, is evidence that chaos wants to be controlled. The fact that we are destroying nature proves that control is superior to chaos. "

Quote:The author failed to define progress, and why we want it.

Not that I don't agree, but why?

Ok well, assuming chaos is choice...I have no desire for to give my choice to anyone else. I agree that control is superior to chaos. Whether it's a good idea...

Also, why what?

[kennyBOY]

The main questions are: Can we stop control? And is control necessary for our survival?

[liq3]

Gunther Wrote:The main questions are: Can we stop control? And is control necessary for our survival?

Yes. Hell no. I might give reasons later

[Bob Dole]

Mmm. Chaos is the natural state of things, and control requires energy to maintain. Control may seem prevalent for a while, but in the end it always collapses, simply because if one flaw is present, it corrupts the whole system and eventually the whole thing collapses like towers hit by jumbo jets. In the end control is an illusion, just a few steps away from chaos again.

[SoulRiser]

Who the fuck wants their life to be that ordered and controlled? Not me!
I like this quote: "Chaos is not disorder; it is order without control."

And I wonder, why does it have to be one or the other... can't we have both? Control some aspects of life while letting others be more random? Wouldn't that be more interesting?

Actually, does control even exist at all? Sure, you can set schedules for factory workers, but they don't have to follow them. They can just decide not to. They just generally don't think about doing that, but I don't see how that can be defined as "control" - there is still a choice there.

Quote:The fact that nature permitted control to emerge out of it, is evidence that chaos wants to be controlled.

If nature had to give its permission, that means nature had a choice... therefore, chaos... right? So, "control" is just a part of chaos.

Playing with words is fun. PS: I have no idea what I'm talking about.

[liq3]

:o. Soul wins thread. Even if we made robot versions of ourselves, sooner or later one of them would go rouge, get around all the safe checks, probably start hacking into other robots, and try take over the world or something. Or it might run away to start it's 'species' that actually have choice.

Also, don't forget. Say we did become robots. What happens then? We're robots. So what, we keep advancing? Eventually we'll just be energy, with no physical body. What then? And if as robots we stopped advancing, we'd end up just like the Seagulls. Just staying alive.