Short Take: Whispers of the Eugenics Wars
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People don't appreciate the extent to which we're already living in the Cyberpunk age, or that SciFi has been broadly predicative.
People focus on the 80s cheese and cyborgs that look quaint now. but look at stuff like Metal Gear Solid 2 or Children of Men and a good chunk of predictions about the future have already come to the fore.
Mass Surveillance, Killer Robots, Memes that Overturn Governments, International Covert Wars, Body modification and its consequences…
We're living in a version of the Cyberpunk 2020s... and Mad Max meets Akira style Motorcycle-Paraglider-Quadcopter combined arms warfare is already a reality.
So what comes after? Space travel is still on a distant horizon, but American SciFi is actually fairly consistent about what happens at the end of the Cyberpunk age:
The Eugenics Wars
From Star Trek to indie horror games like Stasis to even japanese "Art" like DropOut or American-Canadian fetish series like Handmaid's Tale...
SciFi has prophesied an age of Demographic collapse, Bio-Authoritarianism, Human Experimentation and Post-Geneva/Post-Nuremburg Total War...
You already see hintings of this in China where the CCP is slowly laying the Groundwork for turning the “One Child Policy” from a Maximum to a Minimum... And western nations have already had a taste of early bio-Authoritarianism with the implementation of Lockdowns and Vaccine Mandates.
You see this in the blockades and restrictions on food, medical supplies, and water we see in conflicts from Yemen, to Gaza, to China's Quarantined apartment blocks.
You also see it in the slow changing of Abortion from being a private, out of pocket, scandal between desperate women and unusual doctors... to be a sacralized function and battleground of politics and public policy/finances.
The slow disappearance of the distinction between the Body, Technology, and the government.. And the inevitable militarization of that space is already taking root.
The use of Nerve gas and chemical weapons in the Ukraine war has been accused by both sides, with several videos seeming to show drone dropped nerve agents drowning soldiers... whilst others argued it was mere fragmentation causing brain damage.
Whilst in Gaza, Israel has promoted the Idea dogs and other "bio-robots" could clear tunnels... even as commentators call for the use of Gas and other weapons... and even as other Critics of Israel have accused them of deliberately trying to create the conditions for Typhoid and other epidemics in Gaza.
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Of course in a decaying international order, the temptation to refine and experiment, to produce more perfect weapons becomes ever more pressing as it becomes increasingly unlikely you'll be rescued from the weapons of others if you don't.
And of course as we edge through the 21st century, people increasingly see their fellow man as such alien biological weapons.
One need not look long at various migrant debates to see people accusing their political rivals of wielding endless third world populations against them... a possibility that becomes more horrifying if you follow discussions of IQ or group differences in behaviour... where a covert consensus is slowly arising that morality and intellect should no longer be considered personal virtues or the products of culture... but the immutable phenotypic expressions of biological genetics, a discussion all the more disturbing for the hard data supporting it.
And then of course there is the matter of demographic collapse and the failure of developed populations to replace themselves... a problem that threatens political and societal stability as every nation depends on future generations to fund and maintain the vast retirement and medical apparatus that keeps the elderly alive and fed decades beyond working life.
It is no coincidence that famed Canadian Feminist Authors and Japanese Hentai Artists both settled on state enforced breeding programs as the subject of their most famous works.
Canada and Japan being two of the nations furthest along the path of birth rate collapse.
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but the real horrors remain only hinted in the realms of SciFi... the moment when state, terrorist, and mercenary violence stops simply weaponizing the ending of life... but its creation. The moment the Biomedical Security apparatus stops simply seeking to control, manipulate, regulate and end life... but to create new life more in line with its purposes.
The Israel-Gaza War and Russo-Ukraine War are both defined by Conscription... and its limitations.
The resistance of the population to fighting, the political complications of demanding sacrifices and the scrutiny such demands bring... the inherent flaws of teenagers or middle aged men freshly arrived or returning fat and old to the world of combat.
What temptation must arise, in the setting decades of the modern world... to transcend these imperfectly human considerations? To create the perfect tools for the job? To escape the vagaries of culture and romance and bring human capital, like matterial capital, into the realm of industrial production?
Nobody wants such a world... but SciFi authors have long speculated about what might happen when necessity finally does away with desire.
When the Eugenics Wars cease to be unspeakable, and instead become unavoidable.
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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak
Great piece.
In the last few days, I was taking notes for an up-coming piece "Are We Living in a Science Fiction Movie?" You touched on the main subject, which is predictive programming.
On that note, I did read a fascinating piece not long ago, "Charles Manson’s Science Fiction Roots: How L. Ron Hubbard and Robert Heinlein influenced a murderous cult":
https://newrepublic.com/article/145906/charles-mansons-science-fiction-roots#:~:text=In%201963%2C%20while%20a%20prisoner,of%20Mental%20Health%20(1950).
If you haven't read that one, I'm sure you'll love it. We know the New Republic is itself a spawn of the whole H.G. Wells predictive programming circles, however it mentions many wild facts, including how Charles Manson developed some of his ideas from the sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. But more interesting is the actual nexus of science fiction writers it talks about, Hubbard, Heinlein, Campbell. All were Futurists essentially working out various mystical ideas on the future "evolution" of mankind.
The irony is that fiction in many ways gets us closer to truth than anything else. It allows us to work out various fundamental questions and to play them out. Often, this means the author may be talking about one thing, but then actually saying something else. There's a term for that in hypnosis, it's called "stacked realities."
And of course, we all know the famous quote by Julian Huxley, the first director of UNESCO, talking about its ultimate goal being to make eugenics once again "thinkable." Culture, films, television became the clearest route to priming the imagination, introducing all sorts of various themes in ostensibly fictive scenarios, but ultimately coloring the imagination in new ways and making many things that were once unimaginable or "unthinkable" suddenly possible.
I've lost count of the amount of "sci-fi" Hollywood films, series on Netflix, Amazon Prime etc... which have as the underlying theme man's genetic modification and the creation of more advanced, intelligent and stronger humans. The genetically modified superior humans are always presented in contrast to their mere organic 1.0 human beings. Limitless with Bradly Cooper is another interesting one. He takes the pills, suddenly he's smarter, smoother, and more charming.
The soul is never really broached. Or if it is, it's ultimately suggested that it's ultimately just a bio-chemical property, and can be altered like everything else about human beings.
We've been primed.
https://x.com/evilvizier/status/1649147662757928960?s=46&t=KYDpT9cMWrcAf_ElarE1dg JSanilac has a truly phenomenal essay on Ultrahumanism which is basically this premise but in a much more positive light. I think the future even just the next 3-5 years due to AI rapidly accelerating all of this will become a mix of both dystopia and utopia extremes to be found from both ends amalgamated into something very strange.
Assuming AI can build layers of protection from its most pernicious effects it may in fact be a much better rather than worse state of affairs compared to today with potential pockets of isolated breathing room from all the resultant insanity this level of technological advancement will inevitably bring.