Blessings of the Abyss
On the Internet of Non Binary Bodies
Noun
non-binary (plural non-binaries)
(computing) Something which is not a binary; a computer file that is not readable text.
1994 June 7, "Zhar", Don't Post Non-Binaries In alt.binaries.doom, alt.games.doom, Usnet:Please don't post non-binaries into alt.binaries.doom. Pretty please.
Profilic identity, gender identity and other forms of second-order avatar construction, enable analysts to easily filter and siphon enormous amounts of data. “Non-binary gender identities” make unreadable masses of neurotic biotrash legible to surveillance and cybernetic systems. Once baseline behaviors and “risk profiles” are mapped from the cultivated data, ever more fine-grained individual consumer data profiles may be formed within various algorithmic targeting systems (i.e. social media networks, MMORPGs, search engines, SIB markets, etc).
”Gender identity” is a perfect example of a gamified, psychometric identification system. You don’t even need to be paid for this wealth of granular psychometric data, you get “social proofs” for sharing your pronouns, transitioning, or other forms of aesthetic self-fashioning. It is immensely convenient that the media and academia began carpet-bombing the public mind with non-binary gender identity—a system for creating new forms of authenticity that renders individuals more legible, and therefore more vulnerable, to surveillance systems—at the exact moment those systems became mature enough to handle such data profiles.
”One of the most lucrative markets to have arisen from the commerce and compilation of individual data profiles is “risk profile” generation. Risk profile generation firms use vast amounts of psychometric data to a similar end as algorithmic targeted marketing systems; both seek to predict future behavior. However, while targeted marketing systems seek to predict consumer behavior in order to maximize profits, risk profile generation firms claim to protect companies from “bad investments” by algorithmically determining how likely an individual is to default on a loan, be a bad employee, or even become addicted to opioids. Zuboff examines some recent successes in this new “surveillance-as-service” industry, including an app that instantly determines an individual’s creditworthiness using behavioral sources such as “texts, emails, GPS coordinates, social media posts, Facebook profiles, retail transactions, and communication patterns” (Zuboff 2019, 172) and a company that provides “risk reports” for employers and landlords about potential employees and tenants which mines an individual’s social media profiles, “including entire conversation threads and private messages,” in order to determine personality, financial stress level, and even “protected status information such as pregnancy and age” (Zuboff 2019, 172–3).”
—Non-binary gender identity and algorithmic-psychometric marketing legibility, Cannon 2021
In 2014 Google Chief Economist Hal Varian authored two articles. Varian declared four uses that follow from computer-mediated transactions: ‘data extraction and analysis,’ ‘new contractual forms due to better monitoring,’ ‘personalization and customization,’ and ‘continuous experiments.’ Simultaneous with this came Google’s investment in machine learning, drones, wearables, self-driving cars, nanoparticles that ‘patrol’ the body for signs of disease, and smart devices for the home. These are each essential components of this growing network of smart sensors and Internet-enabled devices intended as a new intelligent infrastructure for objects and (non-binary) bodies (Bradshaw, 2014a, b;Kovach, 2013; BBC News, 2014; Brewster, 2014; Dwoskin, 2014; Economist, 2014; Fink, 2014; Kelly, 2014; Lin, 2014; Parnell, 2014; Winkler and Wakabayashi, 2014).
”This new power “to make them dance” does not employ soldiers to threaten terror and murder. It arrives carrying a cappuccino, not a gun. It is a new “instrumentarian” power that works its will through the medium of ubiquitous digital instrumentation to manipulate subliminal cues, psychologically target communications, impose default choice architectures, trigger social comparison dynamics and levy rewards and punishments — all of it aimed at remotely tuning, herding and modifying human behavior in the direction of profitable outcomes and always engineered to preserve users’ ignorance.” (Zuboff, 2020)
A peculiar harmony of transhumanism and transgenderism came hot on the heels of much discussion around the limitations and opportunities of “Social Impact Bonds” (SIBs). These financial instruments, also called “pay for success’’(PFS), is based on the idea that if programs backed by investors succeed in reducing, for example, the number of “teens” in prison or the homeless population, governments will achieve big savings, which they can tap to pay off investors with significant returns. If the programs fail, the government will owe little or nothing. In essence, they are an attempt to marketize/financialize certain contemporary, intractable “social problems”, securitizing homeless schizophrenics or opioid addicts.
Legible information, in the form of captured data, is instrumental to successful Pay For Success deals. Investors must carefully define both interventions and outcomes to increase the chances for success. Armed with predictive analytics, algorithms can make pronouncements of future problematic behaviors well in advance, a form of pre-crime, authorizing non-profit partners to vigilantly enforce behavioral and psychic compliance within the parameters of the surveillant enclosure.
The IXO platform, profiled in the video above, is set up to allow internal prediction markets in which investors can bet for or against a project’s success. The idea is to reduce humans to digitally chained ‘data verified outcomes’ which trigger impact bond payouts, globally investable and tradeable through AI-managed slave auctions.
“Impact tokens contribute to the UN SDGs and often represent a specific impact in the form of a measurement metric such as number of vaccinations, tonnes of carbon dioxide or number of children attending school. These tokens are registered on a blockchain and can be tracked along a supply chain. They offer proof that a positive impact has been delivered, which can then be attributed to a particular activity or investment.”
—Impact Tokens A blockchain based solution for impact investing
This architecture allows one to bet for, or against, social outcomes. So if you are aware that a certain population is more prone to suicide or exotic plagues, you can shorten that project. Health insurance asset-backed securities and sports betting are two well-known instances where a single thing or event is decomposed into a range of attributes, each of which is priced and traded discretely. Behind such processes are global finance markets that are looking to place bets on the risks of everyday life. This is where social impact tokens come in.
Blockchain tokens can represent any exchangeable valuables such as time, ownership, contracts, certificates, expertise, in-game currencies, services, Schwabstack loyalty points, memberships, financial instruments, government bonds, or even energy produced. Impact tokens are valued for their capacity to deliver measurable and verifiable impacts, from which better-informed decisions can be made regarding investments and the allocation of resources.
Impact Tokens are units of value created through the Internet of Impact. Each Impact Token represents a real-world outcome state that people care about, are willing to invest in, work towards, or spend their money on. Impact tokens will become the new standard for measuring, verifying, reporting and valuing impacts through marketplace mechanisms.
—The Internet of Impact
For example, Amply, from the IXO Foundation, is digitizing the management of early education programs by recording children’s school attendance on the Ethereum blockchain and issuing tokens as proof of impact in exchange for governmental subsidies. Another example is Energi Mine, which uses AI to alter energy consumption patterns. Consumers can earn ETK tokens as part of the program by exhibiting energy-saving behavior such as commuting via public transportation, buying an electric vehicle, or consuming less energy at home or in the workplace. ETK tokens can be sold or exchanged for real money, used to pay for future energy bills/electric vehicle charging/public transport, or perhaps participate in social impact markets, thereby completing the ouroboros.
Social impact bonds are being positioned to pursue the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. On July 25th, OurCrowd hosted ‘Investing in FoodTech: Making Tomorrow’s Meals,’ an online discussion featuring FoodTech experts, the CEO of Ripple(a plant-based milk substitute), Yuval Klein, Co-founder and CEO of BlueTree Technologies, and Dr. Lara Ramdin, CIO of Dole Sunshine Company, the largest producer of fruit and vegetables in the world. OurCrowd and other investment funds are currently using SIBs to wage biological warfare on white countries. This is done by “nudging” consumption patterns away from animal protein and replacing them with hazardous, experimental biotech products.
In furtherance of turning every aspect of existence into a demented carnival-casino, there needs to be a continuous source of data, requiring constant surveillance and quantification of activity. This is because payouts that investors receive from a tokenized impact bond are automatically adjusted based on the real-world data continuously gathered on the project. The real world data gets fed into “oracles” which predict the probability of the project meeting their outcome goals.
In order for these AI oracles to work, they need to develop psychometric risk profiles of those targeted by impact projects. Psychometric targeting is most successful when individuals engage in highly personalized, visible, and expansive online behavior and self-representation, as these are far better indicators of one’s interiority than purely demographic categories. Non-binary identity is a framework for creating ideal consumptive “self-created” desiring-machines. Authenticity is replaced by profilicity, a form of externally sourced authenticity based on gratification. Acts of consumption are the primary means by which genderfluid hyper-goblins can make their “true self” apparent to others.
Machine learning models trained on vast amounts of “dark data” farmed from the “labor of authenticity” are used to develop ever more granular risk/consumer/behavior profiles. “Polyracial demi-gendered uterus having otherkin” is the description of an assemblage of modular fetishes, not a human. Such assemblages are only defined by their desires and therefore have no discrete molecular organization. In other words, it has no cell walls, no skin, no skeleton; it is a levitating mass of quivering flesh. Because it must consume in order to take shape, and it’s shape is informed by consumption, it has extremely high data porosity.
In the example of education, instead of the unquantifiable energetic and psychological interplay between classmates and teachers, young children are isolated in virtual environments and manipulated into emotionally connecting with machinic mammies or cartoon chimera designed by neuroscientists to capture their attention and warp their psyche through cybernetic feedback loops. To become sensible to the algorithms, they must be exposed to the void and receive its blessings. The classroom is depressurized, the students are turned inside out, and all their secret tissues decompose, becoming quantifiable.
In essence, the zoo of gender abstractions provide a form of virtual body that can be deterritorialized and made visible to surveillance. The gender identity paracosm constitutes a virtual environment, which is at base a customizable ordering device. Put another way, genderfluid, agender, bigender, demigender, polygender ad nauseum represent an “informatization of the body”, making the arc into oblivion of bioleninist disintegration visible, sensible and computable.
Last year SoftBank invested in DNABLOCK, a 3D creation platform for virtual avatars, virtual worlds and other digital content. The creator of the platform stated "You can't have a Facebook or a game studio running the metaverse. It's not scalable. In order to achieve scale in the metaverse, you've got to have a community of independent creators." Cartoon avatars and the gender spectrum will allow future trash mobs to be that “community of independent creators”, voluntarily mapping the interiority of decay. This will allow managers and cyberneticians to predict erratic behaviors, wrangle retards, and otherwise constrain these wildly mutating “gifts of the abyss”.
“I don’t care whether you call me he or she or refer to me as a man or a woman,” Cory Wade said. “I never felt it was necessary to settle in any one place on the spectrum. My identity is up to me. What I am is for me to decide.”
—For Capitalism, Every Social Leap Forward Is a Marketing Opportunity
“It turns out that we all have unused neuromotor pathways” Mark Zuckerberg revealed during last year’s Meta announcement. Futurists speak of our sensory organs and limbs as “plug and play devices”. We are seen as desiring machines that have no fixed existence, infinitely decomposable. Gilles Deleuze's concept of assemblages dovetails perfectly with these postmodern / posthuman imperatives: "A human body is an assemblage of genetic material, ideas, powers of acting and a relation to other bodies" (Colebrook: 2002).
“The emergence of assemblages may enable the dismantling what Gilles Delueze called molecular categories, or what many call binaries. Can there be bodies without organs, or technologically-constructed bodies within complex systems of desire and power relations that continually produce so much difference that the subject might disappear? Queer heterotopias require a post-human vision that not only seeks to disrupt binaries like, man/woman, male/female, hetero/homo, but also human/non-human (Haraway: 1991)”(Jones: 2009)
In 2003, due to public outcry, DARPA scrapped a plan to establish a futures market that would have allowed investors to bet on the probability of coups, assassinations, terrorist strikes and other events in the Middle East. It was based on the notion that futures trading has proven effective in predicting other events such as oil prices and elections. They envisioned that the markets developed might have nonmilitary applications “in strategic analysis for business, technology prediction for engineering, and other analyses of decision outcomes.” The main non-ethical argument against the plan was that markets might not produce reliable information “where there are large asymmetries of information”, a situation that would no longer exist in the internet of non binary bodies. DARPA had made the ill-advised decision to place the program, called FutureMAP, within the Total Information Awareness Office and partnered with the Intelligence Unit of the Economist, attracting negative attention before it could be tested. One of its creators has since made claims that it might be possible to design markets to predict specific terrorist attacks based on concrete information. With enough “dark data”, one could theorize the possibility of predicting the actions of any individual.
We shall see, for FutureMAP is about to be reborn. As I write this, a vast labyrinth of pervasive games and gamified work is being constructed, with social impact markets as a way to bet on the “mutant rats”. Transgenderism will be the programming language of the transhumanist experiment, allowing one to decompose “bodies without organs” into speculative particles. In order to quantify the entropic, one must have a grammar, a grimoire, which describes the generic forms of Hell. Underlying all of these schemes is the ancient goal of reducing the adamos to algorithmic residues. Man strapped to a lattice of silica— a sentient mineral that can be mined and used as fuel or programmable currency— this is their philosopher’s stone.
The strategy to overcome this game— above all else, remain human. These systems rely on you being in suboptimal, neurotic state. They need you to to hit the big, red sodomy button in order to make you legible. Do not let them make sense of you. Reclaim language, and thereby take into your hands the vital process of individuation. Sincerity arborescing at every axis of your existence, in commitment to the social facts at the root of your being—faith, family, blood memory—this is the key to retaining your unique humanness in the face of dehumanization engines, those threshers of conscience. Whirling world machines, they roar like lions, but a true human has nothing to fear.
Your articles should be published and on all major bookstores, but lord knows the quality of your writing does not deserve such placements.
Your work is superb. You tell the facts of a thing no one understands (or even knows about) that reminds me of Moby Dick mixed with Meyrink and maybe a touch of PKD. I honestly thought all writers of any real substance were all long dead until I subscribed to to schwabstack.