A World out of Balance

Rage Against the Machine

A simple desultory phillipic

Megacity in China

The 21st Century kali-yuga Necropolis knows no ideology. It is both machine and organism, but has no soul. The machine has absorbed human souls and feeds off them when needed. Humans supply the crucial algorithms to systems that control everything from financial markets to hospitals and border crossings. But the system that runs the mechanical necropolis of the 21st century knows no distinction between capitalism and communism, between Islam and the Judaeo-Christian ethic. It is out of control. The algorithms now rule other algorithms that run the robots that crank the machine. The city is no longer a metropolitan cosmos that thrives on human culture and ideas. It is a robotic entity with no regard for human values. As time advances the Necropolis takes on a cannibalistic character; the only thing that matters to the system is further growth. It has no ideology other than continued growth. This kind of unconcontrolled growth is cancerous. It tends towards the destruction of the organism, in this case, human society. As a consequence we have uncontrolled violence, anger, crime and drug addiction and war.

Megalopolis, Tyrannopolis, Necropolis: Greater Tokyo

When villages became towns and towns became cities, the human element was still important. Control was ceded to mechanisms run by technocrats as the cities became metropolis. Control was lost when cities became monstrous megalopolis or heartless Tyrannopolis. Now we are entering the last phase of urban desolation: the Necropolis, the City of the Dead. https://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/21/megacities-explosive-growth-poses-epic-challenges.html

The Necropolis knows no ideology: GuanZhou, China

The City of the Dead is no longer controlled by human intelligence. We have delegated control to machines that never sleep, networks, and electronic systems. You might ask, "Is Articial Intelligence upon us?" But the question is beyond academic; it is moot. The algorithms that control financial markets, currency conversion, and access to health control no longer need us and have already gone rogue. https://www.wired.com/story/tim-oreilly-algorithms-have-already-gone-rogue/amp

Map of Megalopolis

The tendency for uncontrolled growth and the acceptance of control algorithms in the City of the Dead doesn’t distinguish between religious persuasion, sexual preference, or racial identity; it feeds on all souls equally, rending sweat and blood into liquid gold and silver, boiling flesh and bone into Dollars and Euros, Deutschmarks and Drachma, and even smelting currency down into the ones and zeros of the digital combine.When Machines Rule

Mexico City, Aerial view

The Kali-yuga Necropolis is indiscriminate. The city of the dead uses the technology of metamorphosis to transform potatoes into potato chips, cows into hamburgers, pigs and horses into dog food, life into ashes and the human spirit into stone.

Bombay Kali-yuga Necropolis: the City of the Dead

Even Satan, the fallen angel of Paradise, had a soul. Necropolis has none. The human soul exists only to provide the city of the dead with the precious algorithms that fuel the robot culture. But the machine knows neither remorse nor contrition. Moloch, the golden calf, bloody god of child sacrifice, would run terrified from the kali-yuga monster that is the Necropolis.

Chicago Housing Projects

A frog in gradually heated water doesn’t notice that he is boiling. We may ask how we came to the boiling point, but again,  the point is moot. Cities became metropolis over the centuries. The metropolis became megacities and necrotic necropolis in my lifetime.  We were educated to believe that all growth is good. The cancer that is upon us is unstoppable. While millions self-medicate themselves with recreational drugs, there is no chemo-therapy that can stop the Necropolis.
With the world poised on the brink of nuclear destruction, lamentably perhaps only radiation therapy could halt the progress of the Necropolis, the city of the dead. But reducing the world to ashes in order to rebuild human civilization is unacceptable not only to us, but it is anathema to the prevailing algorithms as well. The machine must grow to survive; no apocalypse is permitted.  Only a gradual eclipse of human culture and life by speeding up the machine and grinding us into soul-less ashes. Thus we spin in an eccentric orbit. We are off balance.

The indigenous native American word for a "world is out balance" is koyaanisqatsi. As the unbalanced world of the Necropolis alters our priorities and values we don't notice since we are busy being forced to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place.

With the uncontrolled growth demanded by the urban evolutionary process, Metropolis must morph into Megalopolis; Megalopolis must morph into Necropolis. The laws of the machine, the algorithms of the corporations must be followed; they are encoded into the system. Human life just isn't as valuable as it used to be. Why should it? A human life is now only a cog in the machine.

It is not a question of being a Republican or a Democrat; Black or White; Catholic or Islam. We all subscribe to the same system. In order to operate we need to co-operate with the system. And now that we have ceded control to the algorithms that run the machine, we can't even question how the system works. You cannot defeat the system. The house always wins.

As Leonard Cohen observed:
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows the war is over

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That's how it goes Everybody knows.