Capitalism of late humans

A thought. Please indulge me.
CRISPR is derived from a bacterial mechanism that provides immunity from viruses by using RNA to cut and paste snippets of the viral attacker into the genetic code of the bacterium itself.
There are large scale endeavors to use genetic editing strategies to engineer responses to actual viruses. The arguments for expediency and exigency abound.
That these things come into our knowledge and come into technoscientific existence so quickly —seemingly all at once—- makes my brain hurt.
This is all happening so fast, my friends. Much of it in less than a decade. And even that short time scale seems to be compacting upon itself.
PostScript Sat March 15
But what we never seem to understand is that just because we have power doesn’t mean we are in control. Which, I am convinced, speeds up the process of humans attempting to colonize, cum synthesize, cum automate their individual AND aggregate activities. Whether we can admit it or not, synthetic biology is already here. A crisis like this will only expedite acknowledging the transformation of current and subsequent Homo sapiens genetics, before, during and after ‘expression’.
A species expands asymptotically, no longer what it thought it was, unbecoming in media res.
Or so I tell myself. #talesofthelatehuman
Accelerators and accelerants, recombinant and chaotic. Synthetic life emerges from this bacterial animal which, having colonized everything, learns to colonize anew. It grows, it devours, it blooms, it dies. But not without giving birth to other forms of life, intentionally and otherwise. The Xenobots arrive.
I’ve lost interest in maintaining anything other than spoken voice—presence. Writing seems like failure.
The rate of extraction of our linguistic domains, written and spoken, feels like extinction to me. Nothing else. Those at the top, we apex predators, best flee the earth or hack our own genomes and biomes to give ourselves, up and over, to other possible worlds, living and dead. We at the top are the most precarious of all. This is what I like to call autocolonialism. (“We do it to ourselves, we do.”) Naming it, defining it, giving it shape and form in language seems to do nothing more than extract further the value of whatever resistance might be articulated, rendered, voiced. I feel as though language is leaving us.
“It wears him out”
“Was a story selected for its statistical prominence among news organs, or because a personalization algorithm picked it out for us? If the selection was based on statistics, then which statistics—the number of mentions of the story, the authority of the news outlets promoting it, or something else entirely?” Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society (2015)
I’m thinking, erm, something else entirely. #agnotology #talesofthelatehuman
Upgrade, feverish
Newness begets what we have found: nothingness. We could never be present in such expectations of a future, predicated upon nearly instantaneous forms of obsolescence.
The past and future enfold upon this non-existent now; a now which is forgetting, forgotten. Gone. Absent: Present. The late human sleepsasleep, wakesawake, shuns extinct, shuns.
We thought we were human as we consciously passed the ghost of ourselves onwards.
Past, psst, passed. Life.
#talesofthelatehuman
Writ(h)ing, always. These words. They fail me, fail us. New languages yet to be invented are just beyond my grasp, but I suspect not yours. But discourse in late liberalism is an ecological nightmare. Our publics a whispered -shush- of open secrets, power seeks anonymity and finds sanction from the highest courts in the land. United citizens, whistleblowing automata, what programs will we invent, to tell ourselves anything resembling this thing we have become. Maybe human once, but no longer, no longer.