Photonic Workhouses and Behavioral Scrip – Synthetic Pretenders Part 9

This is the ninth installment in the Synthetic Pretenders series examining the proposed CaliforniaTrust Framework within the context of synthetic biology, eugenics, and the Spanish mission system. 

Part One: Scientific Management, Robo-Bees, and Digital Babies

Part Two: Apocalypse, Mind Files, and Interplanetary Promises

Part Three: The “Magic” of Radio-Eugenics and Holographic Twins

Part Four: Ritual Gaming and Berggruen’s Transformation of the Human

(Follow-Up Interview with Leo Saraceno, Silicon Icarus’ 53 Degree Podcast)

Part Five: Elite Views on Automated Law and Vending Machine Democracy

Part Six: Reject Scientific Management, Celebrate “Weeds”

Part Seven: Computational Life and Industrial Design Erode the Boundaries of Our Being

Part Eight: Market Alchemy and Illuminated “Well-being”

It is my contention that you cannot disconnect developments in synthetic biology and hybrid life from California’s legacy of eugenics. The field emerged from ideas around racial superiority, inherited intelligence, and expectations that individuals and families meet prescribed social norms. Fourth Industrial Revolution energy accounting and tracking of social investment against economic productivity must absolutely be considered against the backdrop of graded human capital, behavioral compliance to sustainability metrics, and manufactured conditions of scarcity, debt, and displacement.

As the “end of the world” narrative continues to unfold with the imagined Singularity on the horizon, I foresee a ramping up of demands for social efficiency, the obligation of demonstrably (through generation of IoT impact data) doing one’s part to help “save the world.” Namely this would involve building and defending the digital empire while submitting to bio-tech upgrades as required.

This ethos combined with “work hard” imperatives embedded in faith-based NGOs lined up to deliver privatized social welfare “solutions” could easily result in techno-Dickensian workhouses of unwaged and un-free labor: children, refugees, and prisoners. See this telling clip from a February 2020 Simpsons episode, “The Miseducation of Lisa Simpson.” If you watch the entire segment, you’ll see that it opens with a performance by John Legend, a University of Pennsylvania graduate honored for entrepreneurship by Wharton, who helped roll out the LRNG anytime/anywhere, mixed-reality competency-based, skills-badge education model being parodied.

Source: Full Episode of The Miseducation of Lisa Simpson

Now about those upgrades…

This month, IBM and Dell announced the creation of the Responsible Computing consortium, a membership group committed to “sustainable” business practices I imagine may be determined by the United Nations/WEF in consultation with the Impact Management Project. The alternative energy sector is deeply intertwined with synthetic biology and hybridized “life,” not to mention human piezo-electric energy harvest.

Source: Overview of Human Piezoelectric Energy Harvest and Application, 2022

In 2018, I wrote a short story that featured children laboring in data centers managing racks of artificial DNA. George Church, based at Harvard and the Wyss Institute was publishing experimental results with in vitro artificial DNA data storage a decade ago. At that time, I was not aware of in-vivo applications for DNA data storage. It shook me to realize in vivo applications, to store digital files in live bacteria, had been developed the year before.

It’s significant that the first GIF preserved in bacterial DNA was a 5-frame clip of Eadweard Muybridge’s “Horse In Motion.” Leland Stanford, California governor, railroad baron, and horse racing enthusiast, commissioned a set of images of his horse Sallie Gardner running at the Palo Alto race track to better understand gait analysis. Gait analysis is an alternative to facial recognition in determining identity through artificial vision / surveillance. Stanford University researchers and alumni are at the nexus of the military-finance complex advancing Metaverse life through impact investing and bio-nano-technology. We are literally racing towards a post-human future, the twin spurs of a global economy built on disruptive innovation and narratives of apocalyptic climate crisis driving us forward.

Source: The Horse In Motion

Horse In Motion was the first example of chrono-photography where the passage of time was represented. Those who saw the images described the series as “freezing time. The choice of the moving horse feels like a symbolic bookend to the art piece “Dead Horse” created by UK photographer Tim MacMillan in 1998 with the Time-Slice camera he invented to explore manipulations of time and space in the spirit of Cubist painters. The technique was used the following year to film a sequence called Bullet Time in “The Matrix.” For a discussion of that work see Raul Diego’s “Behold A Dead Horse – The Dark Nexus Between Art, Fashion, and Mixed Reality.” Will “time” have the same meaning once we “live” primarily in synthetic realms shaped by military simulations run at varying speeds? And how does the idea of “productivity”  fit into this future of fractured existence? I have so many questions.

Source: Tim Macmillan Early Work 1980-1994

The June 2019 issue of Giga Science features an article by Shihong Chen of the Beijing Genomics Institute and Sha Joe Zhu of Roche, “Carbon-Based Archiving: Current Progress and Future Prospects of DNA-Based Data Storage,” which outlines developments in both in vitro and in vivo DNA data storage protocols. It mentions a collaboration between Twist Biosciences, Microsoft, and the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering to automate construction and deconstruction of coded bits into an artificial DNA structure to maximize data storage in a format that is not likely become outmoded. Remember, Twist Biosciences is collaborating with Berggruen’s TofTH.

The impetus behind sterilization and research into the genetic nature of intelligence was the belief among the elite that over time working class and poor communities became degraded. Thus, public support, through higher taxes on the rich, for perceived non-productive, or inefficient members of society would be an undue burden if reproduction of the masses were not actively managed. This sentiment is illustrated by the Fitter Families movement of the 1920s.

So we must ask ourselves what if Fitter Families 2.0 involves an expectation that for the “common good” under Web 3.0 norms, the masses will be expected to submit themselves to programmed pathways of educational and wellness improvement, bio-digital “upgrades,” and genetically-engineered progeny? In order to survive the dispossession created by this new AI / big data / robotics economic construct, will we be expected to live precarious lives as domesticated livestock? Will we earn our keep by handing over our brains and bodies to imperial bean counters to serve as bio-digital parallel processors for the Global Brain / hivemind?

Here’s one more clip from Carsten Stocker on nano (NEMs, the implantable organism) and CRISPR genetic modification tracked on one’s digital identity, which has been positioned to replace Zeke Emanuel’s Affordable Care Act-enabled electronic health record.

Don’t kid yourself; this is about much more than precision medicine and cancer treatment.

Source: How Your Identity Will Change In The Fourth Industrial Revolution

The bio-computational makeover of human tissues will be accomplished through digital twinning tied to blockchain electronic health records that integrate remote sensing data with tele-medicine prescription compliance.  I think digital identity, the proposed California Trust Framework, is part of that effort.

In an October 2020 blog post Camille Crittenden of CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interests of Society) and the Banatao Institute at UC Berkeley presents work her institute has been pursuing around blockchain health records for unhoused people in the state. They could have just checked with Austin’s ID2020 project where they grabbed biometrics, linked them with health records, and handed people a QR coded on a laminated piece of card stock. I wrote about that here in April 2020.

Source: Camille Crittenden and the CITRIS Policy Lab Publish On Blockchain Digital Identity

CITRIS is working out how to conduct identity verification and pay for the program, but there’s an imperative behind getting this identity infrastructure in place. I suspect investors are getting antsy about accessing the social impact opportunities California’s burgeoning homeless population will create once they’re plugged into interoperable biometric identity systems synced with smart city digital twin optimization. Crittenden chaired the California Blockchain Working Group of which Robert Hertzberg was also a member. Interesting that blockchain health records didn’t come up in Hertzberg’s testimony about potential use cases for the Trust Framework, isn’t it?

Source: California Blockchain Working Group

Could there be some twisted idea that out on the horizon regional health care providers and insurers will provide IoT-enabled housing on the condition that the dispossessed follow prescribed “wellness” protocols, including bio-convergence treatments that will retro-fit them as human computing nodes in some vast photonic network run on blockchain tokenization? At this point nothing seems out of the question, but first things first. Next steps are to close the digital divide, establish biometric blockchain ID, refine outcomes-based contracts for privatized public assistance, build the smart IoT housing, and produce the smart clothing.

How much time do you think we have before California’s tech and finance billionaires and the defense-gaming-entertainment industrial complex slam the door on their ultra-deluxe open-air prison? Mission 2.0

Source: Fifteen Million Merits Analysis