Battlestar Galactica (2000s) and The Rise of Consciousness

The main characters of Battlestar Galactica are Gaius Baltar and the Cylon woman Six. For most of the episodes in the first seasons of the show, they're the same physical character--Baltar and Six is imaginary.

Baltar starts the show as a degenerate genius who uses his gifts for banal purposes. (A more extreme version of Baltar's type of intellectual depravity is offered by Leopold and Loeb.) He's an exemplar of Caprican society--which like ours is another Babylon/Rome. Caprican society peaked when it ~created~ a race of Metic slave machines called the Cylons. Dumb robots were bad slaves, so in the BSG mythology, Zoe Graystone created the technological means to make them conscious and to host human consciousness, which led to their sky-net like obsession with destroying humanity.

Baltar's degeneracy is his (and humanity's) undoing as Six dupes him into revealing all the secret codes and data of the Colonial defense forces. However, in the wake of the fall of their Babylon,
Six ends up instructing Baltar in the form of a vivid waking hallucination away from his degenerate and dissipative life toward being a Jesus type figure, who by the end of the show has undergone a total transformation.

Much like Thulsa Doom in the Conan movies, the cylons serve as a harsh teacher to humanity. Much of the transformation seems to be guided by an understanding of the nature of consciousness--if consciousness is an inherent property of the universe, man's consciousness is not distinct, so a man is not distinct from the universe.

The lack of sympathy or empathy for ~mere~ matter leads to the rise of the cylons. An attempt to escape natural necessity, i.e. death, by Zoe Graystone and to escape into the Symbol World (millions of posts in my blog about that) led to their rise also, and the demise of the race of humanity.

By the end of the series the crew of Galactica has come full circle. They destroy all their technology and return to the Earth (literally and figuratively) and the cylons and humans merge in the birth of a star child.

Corporate Data Mining is the Apotheosis of Neoliberalism

The world wars were the culmination of the transition from rural/agrarian life to industrial mass society. All people could think to do with themselves and their new means of organizing was to murder and die on a mass scale. The post war years seem like a transition to a saner time, at least a time where the insanity of mass warfare became impossible or totally irrational, thanks to nukes.

The past several decades of "neoliberalism", which really just means government run by corporations and banks, has culminated in server farms and data mining, which is just bureaucratic infrastructure. It effectually creates a giant echo chamber for corporate douchebags. It's like the MBA church.

Symbolic Reasoning and "Intelligence"

A couple of Jewish boys murdered a friend of theirs in the early 1900s in an orgy of psychopathic intellectualism. They believed they'd planned the perfect crime, but within a matter of days they were apprehended by the police.

Analytical, symbolic reasoning divorced from all other considerations is foul.

Electronic Consumer Goods Became "Luxury" Items

New cars incorporate aspects of cell phones these days, plus they incorporate many additional sensors and electronic systems. Each of the electronic features is sold as a luxury add on. Many people think of smart phones, laptops, and smart watches as luxury lifestyle items, even though smart phones, watches, and laptops are the most mundane mass produced consumer goods there are. Advertising and "social intelligence" have convinced a large chunk of the population that some glass and plastic gizmo that's owned by millions of people is a desirable luxury good that's worth nearly $1000 and a monthly subscription that amounts to $1000 per year.

Alien Transplants

Most of the places I've visited in the United States and around the world don't have any connection or association with the geographical location they are. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head is Ottawa, Canada, which seemed like it genuinely grew out of its riverine location.

That lack of association with geography applies to almost every house I've ever seen also; it definitely applies to our current home, which is a generic post WW2 house that was built on a unique parcel of land.

The lack of association with geography applies even more to the way people live, which is almost entirely devoid of any connection to where they live. We're all mostly plugged into some generic corporate culture.

When European people settled this area they must have had some blueprint in mind for what they were trying to create, and that thing had nothing at all to do with where they settled. The thing that's maybe more difficult to believe is that it seems their ancient ancestors did a similar thing in Europe.

Twitter and Faceberg Woes

The tech "boom" starting in the 1990s was all financed by devaluing the USD. The newly printed money was used to give an incentive to people like me to work in "tech".

Tech bubble 1 popped in the early 2000s. I switched careers back then to chase the Greenspan Monopoly Money.

It sort of looks like tech bubble 2 is popping now, and as an interesting coincidence, I got tired of Faceberg a few years ago, and twitter a few months ago. Once I quit those, I realized I wasn't missing much. Now, I'm eyeing my android spyphone device as a useless and expensive gizmo that's not adding much to my day to day life.

A lot of the investment and development in tech bubble 2 produced derivative trivial "new tech", like Fuckface. The replacement cost of Faceberg's servers and software development is a fraction of the "market cap" of the company, same deal with Twitter.

The whole scheme of data mining people and selling it is the fucktarded echo of google's original good idea of targeted internet ads, which seems almost totally tapped out after a couple decades thanks to ad blocking. Similarly, data mining is a non-value added activity that every company is doing now in a sort of Jonestown style koolaid binge.

It looks like tech bubble 2 is wrapping up.

Non Agricultural Organization of People

There are lots of first hand reports of European people living among Native Americans before and around 1800. They're really interesting reading. It seems like every permutation of relationship happened between the european settlers and the natives. Some were best of friends. Some were adversarial. There were many types of commercial relationships, familial relationships, etc...

I think about William Atherton's account from time to time. He ended up as a captive during the war of 1812, and was really a sort of slave. He lived with a band of hunter gatherers for about 1 year and he witnessed what as basically the remnants of that lifestyle. By then, the settlers were already rapidly depleting the wilderness, and in only a couple of decades that way of life was impossible.

In the Ohio Country, tribes were organized geographically around drainage basins of lakes and rivers. That makes a lot of sense for a couple of reasons. For one, as hunter gatherers, that geographical organization roughly corresponds to the way animals migrate and move around throughout a year. Also, the native peoples used waterways as a primary means of transportation for many centuries prior to European settlement and the introduction of the horse.

Rather than being an idyllic edens filled with tranquil people, the tribes made war on each other for control over these areas and their resources.

When people are really totally dependent on the land to provide the idea that any man or woman could add some value, and hence have value as an individual might really be attenuated. In fact, other people are sort of natural impediments. This idea is something we see some environmentalists espousing.