Masters of Weaponization

Humans are unique predators in their capacity to systematically weaponize every single feature of any system against itself or others

Gaming* is a way to trick the brain to feel intense but hollow emotions, junk-food emotions. You can tell from the way you feel afterwards.

Friends don’t let friends sit and look at the blinking lights all day.

What is gaming if not a good candidate for the least heroic thing a man can do. Click click click click click. Aah, I feel great! Like I just accomplished something, something real. Something not actually completely and utterly dehumanizingly Pavlovian and bottomlessly pathetic.

Pressing a button 20.000 times in a row, sitting completely still while completely non-yogi-like, looking at the beautiful colors on the screen door to Plato’s house. With all the personal agency of a mosquito drunk on light and just going for it from across the garden. “This feels so right…!”.

Zap.

How are you doing, mister zombie? How does being domesticated feel like? Don’t tell me. Let me guess from the spineless posture and the hole in the soul where the spark goes.

Humans are unique predators in their capacity to systematically weaponize every single feature of any system against itself or others

This is likely to be a good part of the reason why we expend such efforts on coorporation. Why would anyone want to square off against a master of weaponization? Why would a master of weaponization ever stop weaponizing?

To defend against that is to become self-aware.

Yogi or perish.

And so…

In a really real way, self-awareness is a martial art.

*) Gaming takes some flak in this essay but I hope the generality of the mechanism is apparent - aka [INSERT TECHNOLOGY HERE].