I Am A Programmed Animal

The first step is admitting you are housebroken

Yuval Noah Harari gets a lot of flak for his “man is a hackable animal” sentence at one of the Davos events, where Klaus Barbie à la Klaus Schwab liked to put him on a pedestal to coruscate the technocratic wet dream of syncing up humanity with a black box. A deep insult to an individual human who still believes in free will, open choices, honest work.

I never met the dude. So I am not sure whether he meant it as a technocratic opportunity, or even an obligation, to mold human beings. But there is no doubt he was spot on about the contention that we are extremely programmable. And even if we do not like being called animals — I do not mind, I look up to most animals — give a decent engineer the principal methods of social engineering and he will have us hooting for an opossum as the next presidential candidate.

I pull out of my own identity for a second and watch myself run the day. I scan my own groceries and thank the register. I accept all cookies to reach a lasagna recipe. I repeat a headline I never opened and call it my opinion. I call the other side sheep and bleat this week’s three talking points back at them. I root for a celebrity like he is my home team. I swap my profile picture for a flag. I am not a programmable animal. I am a programmed one, housebroken, tags jingling. Call me a pet and I bite.

I love you Yuval, thanks for reminding me!

We may entertain constant ideas of free choices. But they remain in a defined matrix of options, the size of which keeps dropping in inverse logarithmic proportions as we head towards digital currency and ID alignment, as we input and output nigh everything via AI out of convenience, as we vent our beliefs and frustrations through social algorithms that know us better than we do ourselves, as we press our unique viewpoints in a debate where both sides, all sides, are narratively conformed to a single agenda.

And we do it because any other way would force us to accept that it is all theater.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

We would have to swallow, for example, that all sides of the Middle East war are dictated by the same group of interest holders betting long on an energy crash. Or that the two parties screaming at each other across the debate stage cash their checks from the same short list of donors. Or that the great wars and elections of the past ran the same way, and probably a few centuries before that. Or that the former Chief Medical Advisor to the president, who this week pleaded the Fifth 111 times on questions that more or less suggest an orchestrated, slow-acting genocide, is part of a puppet play where even his takedown was scripted before the plandemic.

The furious crowd feels vindicated, and the timing is perfect, because their faith in the system had already rotted through to the floorboards, so they cheer the takedown, pop the bottle, and never once clock that it’s virtual reality. The window opens another inch. Behind it sits a 180-IQ patience with all the time in the world, aimed at the single vision the little cabal has been nursing for generations.

Then come the theories about who holds the strings. Aliens. Zionists. Bloodlines running clear back to the pharaohs, thumbs in our soup since the day we were monkeys. Pick your movie ticket. They sell all of them in the gift shop. Who drives the car matters a good deal less than where the road leads, and we drive that route faster every day. By choice. We do not even need the cabal anymore.

I am in Linz as I write this, the third city of Austria, where the locals have gone old and stiff and comfortably heavy and spend their afternoons limping from the bakery to the pharmacy, counting coins at the register, feeding the pigeons, filing complaints about the trams, while the immigrant streets fill and thicken and get loud, and a shop owner cannot wire his own money across a border anymore without some clerk reading him his rights. All of it wears the flat face of an ordinary Tuesday.

That is the Overton window talking. Wider by a crack while you queued for bread.

The shortages are coming and the energy crash is coming and the migration waves are coming and a dozen other pressures sit loaded in the chamber, waiting to scrape the last recognizable paint off Europe, and the next pandemic will land on schedule, and the war with Russia will spread with the same dull certainty, each blow rationed out small enough that we file it by nightfall as one more Normal day, pour a drink, and go looking for the remote.

That is how good the design is. Too good for a roundtable of well-tailored men to have sketched alone, however clever and however hungry. This moves more like one enormous organism, every cell still certain it has options. The thing runs top-down from the war room — but it runs bottom-up for the grand course, through us, by us. It just needs a nudge and we jump over the cliff as one giant caterpillar.

So what do you do?

Become a hobo and sleep under the stars with the ticks. Build a self-sufficient community in the jungle and find out fast which of your new brothers knows how to fix a generator. Try to exit the matrix in some decentralized wet dream, cold wallet in one hand, seed phrase tattooed where the taxman cannot reach. Cosmonaut the far end of the universe in a blaze of DMT and come home with a business card from the machine elves. Or let another day pass as another Normal and settle into Pink Floyd’s comfortable numbness, with free parking.

I have no idea. Every exit I can name looks stamped and filed already, somewhere deep in the plan. What I do know is that arguing over who did what, and what ought to be done about this or that, is the program running exactly as it was built to run.

The real exit sits somewhere in the mind, in the spirit riding around inside the body. Stop flinching at the show. Watch it clear-eyed, make a quiet discipline out of the watching, set down the weight, and finally take your hands off the wheel of the narrative altogether, the way Odysseus unhooks himself from Calypso and the lotus flower at last, shoves the raft off the sand, and lets the ocean carry him wherever Zeus already means to set him down – sans fear.

Ergo. There is a good reason to be more optimistic about life than ever. We have been handed an evolutionary wet dream. Exactly because everything is about to get crazier, harder, even more chaotic than it already is. The perfect setting for development – if we so choose.

The human animal does not evolve without resistance, unpredictability, the certainty of disaster. What we are looking at now is the Jurassic in a Borg deep-space transport. Prime content for our next quantum leap as programmable animals.

Picture the alternative. Heaven. Utopia. Justice. Fairness. Equity. Never once facing the surreal, the horror, the mediocre, the betrayal, then fading out in absolute comfort. Well, thank Zeus, this is not what this simulation is about.

This is level one. Clear it, and the next one is going to get wild.