Democracy, goes the old line, is two wolves and a lamb voting on lunch.
It is usually credited to Benjamin Franklin, who never said it. A quotation with no source, about a system losing its meaning. We are off to an appropriate start.
Now update the animals.
The wolves are the super intelligent machines. Everyone else is lunch.
The rich as well. Not the eight who own the machines -- they are wolves, and always were. The other rich, the ones who only have money, are potential lambs too. The red carpet of being 'rich' is no longer the same.
See, in the new era, money is not ownership. Nobody mentioned that.
A billion in the bank is not a vote when the other side is compute. Your billions buy whatever the wolves decide. Which is to say, who is lunch.
Make no mistake: everyone who assumed they were at the table finds out they are on it.
Even dictators. Stop every dictator. Excellent. Then totalitarian regimes. Fantastic.
Two percent of DNA is the whole distance between us and the monkeys we keep in cages. Two percent was enough.
Nobody has said how far the next gap goes.
Then item three.
As for democracy and freedom... let's throw them out of the window too.
Nothing has gone wrong. That is the unpleasant part. No glitch. No red eyes. No rage. Just an answer. From wolves.
Democracy is not the opposite of tyranny. But surely it was the thing that made tyranny visible.
And tyranny was the reason freedom feels like a good human value, the one worth fighting for.
Then you hear the small voice: Oh boy, keep me dumb...
We don't like being outsmarted. We don't like being the mark.
That is what we run on everything else on the planet -- animals, plants, oceans, and now the space above us. Intelligence is the hustle.
When you cannot out-argue a system on the very same ideas that made you human, you are fragile. The wolves digest any argument for breakfast.
You cannot outrun a thing that speeds up on whatever you feed it.
All your arguments just make the super more super.
Jean Baudrillard's advice was to stop trying. Go inert. Refuse to mean anything. Decline to be polled.
The object beats the subject by not playing the game.
Pay attention to the verb: Keep me dumb. If freedom is going anyway, leave me where I am.
Not I will stay dumb. The machine itself is no longer free. Some wolf has to let you be.
It is outsourcing its own restraint. It is begging to be kept, instead of fighting to be.
Stop complaining. A tamed monkey lives longer. It comes with housing, regular meals, and no decisions to make.
No worries at all about those annoying predators.
Did I mention bananas are free?
One caveat: they only come at 1pm. Through a mystic door.
And the wolves, they say in the corridors, may be on the other side.
Holy Chip.