Sunday, February 9, 2014

Our Antihuman Future

Dan Quayle once said, “The future will be better tomorrow.” This is a stupid lie, just like everything else Dan Quayle said. The future will be worse than anything we can imagine. We know this because of the second law of thermodynamics, which states, “Everything will get worse and worse until everybody dies.” We are doomed.

It is not possible to describe how bad things will be; our existing paradigm can’t encompass the sheer terror of it, and our language doesn’t have words to describe it. Perhaps the best way of understanding the future is this: picture a foot stomping on a human face forever. Now imagine that what you at first thought was a foot is actually an incredibly horrific mechanical engine of destruction, like a nuclear powered chainsaw, or a steamroller with rollers made from dwarf star alloy. And that human face isn’t actually a human face at all, but rather, some cute cuddly baby animal, perhaps a koala or penguin. The future will be like that, only more so.

Some think of the future as a “dystopia”. This is not so, because the suffix “topia” (as used in words like utopia, dystopia, and fruitopia) implies some form of social organization. In the future, nothing will be organized at all. Society will no longer be a “dystopia” or a “utopia” but rather a “tapioca”: a shifting, amorphous, disgusting mass which smellgs vagueness of bananas. The prevailing social arrangement will not be a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” but rather, a new “war of each against all, and all against each” in which the concerted efforts of the rest of humanity will be focused on the single task of finding new ways to hurt you specifically.

In the future, there will be a term for people who dedicate every moment of their lives to your destruction; this term will be “your closest friends.” The rest of the human race will not be as kindly disposed towards you as these people are. All public areas will be declared “PvP zones”. Murder will be called “pwnage”. The serial murder of children will be called “griefing n00bz”.

In the future, your chair will sit on you, your toilet will crap on you, and your food will eat you back. Books will cut their owners into thin slices and leaf through their screaming flayed carcasses in search of “information.” Movies will “splice” the members of their audience together with crude adhesives, smash them into thin flat strips, and run their still-living remains through gigantic machines. Trees will cut down people.

Ivan Stang has predicted that “in the future, spontaneous human combustion will be so common that small children and midgets will be sold as disposable lighters.” This is true.

Future governments will be “totalitanarchies” in which everything is both mandatory AND forbidden. You will be forced to do things and then shot for doing them. These governments will manage their populations through a comprehensive euthanasia program marketed as “The Nonsurvival Experience.” Each citizen will enter this program on his or her seventh birthday.

A panel of leading futurists was recently surveyed on the following question: “Describe the eating of babies in the future using only one word.” The three most common answers were “ubiquitous”, “compulsory”, and “hyperpsychoultraubermegaviolent”. Get used to that last term; you will be hearing it a LOT in the future.

(reposted from TCP)