Nature & nurture or design & downloads?

In the spirit of the times, I’d like to discuss revolution. Though it is one of the most human activities, in this instance, for the sake of clarity & successful generalized speculation, I’ll compare the human mind & spirit as general components of a computing system. In doing so, I hope to outline innate flaws & fortuitous features in the battle for freedom both physically & mentally.

The mind, agreed upon by addicts, philosophers & most high school football coaches, is the greatest obstacle. The body itself can be manipulated – broken to a point. Yet, the mind, the intangible byproduct of this intricate vessel, is moreso susceptible to manipulation & damage, oftentimes beyond repair.

I view the mind, individual & hive-kind, as systems in which necessary informations, or those that are time sensitive, are subject to the tendencies of a hard drive & a RAM drive.

Within this imagined “hard drive” lies the things we’ve patiently & earnestly considered; the information we hold of such high value that it lies stored in the back of the mind ready to be called at-will. This information spurs on the basic action we display with our body: if one truly believes “might is right” on this deep a level, their physical mannerisms & corporeal presentation will reflect in kind: athletic prowess, brute force, checked or unchecked ferocity. Contrarily, if a mindset values peace through inaction or “turning the other cheek” to a comparable degree, we see events like Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation where “as he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him”.

The “basic truths” we all hold are inherited from older generations or our peers, oftentimes in close proximity. Stewardship, privacy, acknowledgment, control, freedom; there are a number of basic driving concepts, diverse as the number of lives one can lead. The energy of these concept stem from older generations (downloading, so to speak) but “update” as needed; 2,000 years ago, the same basic driving concepts existed but were in different stages of application – different times, different operating systems ie governments, prevailing social orders. Freedom today, in most nations, is vastly different than freedoms described centuries ago; privacy, by the day, diminishes in real life but creates more energy, more drive in some to achieve it (and for that we look to Julian Assange for our barely-living example). I see these “basic truths” as things we deeply appreciate across lifetimes, those things whose absence causes a depression of the energy in us all to do whatever we set a healthy & determined mind to. When a computer shuts off, the hard drive still holds all the pertinent information; we may fall asleep, but even in our dreams we are drawn to what we yearn for most & battle that which we fear the most.

This part of the mind is malleable but rather fixed as these inherited ideals, the downloaded desires are replicants, reiterations of past dreams; if they remained so for a millennia, they will probably remain so. The other side, the “RAM” parts, this is where the battle lies.

Here, in the hyperactive front of the mind, the Random Access Memory drive is where external coercion (stress) creates chaos. Comparatively, a RAM drive is the temporary storage space to the constant storage space of a hard drive; too much power is required to recall all information simultaneously, thus we have the limitations of awareness, focus & stress exemplified by the RAM drive.

This part of the mind exists in a state that initially resembles amnesia; upon further observation though, it is better described as the part of the mind directed & detailed by distraction & external commands.

External commands, the keystrokes that request specific files from the hard drive, are the stressors in life that cause us to hyper-fixate on an obstacle, a miscalculation. It’s in these moments we lose sight of the bigger picture; through the same electric shocks that trigger the mechanical response to have the RAM drive retrieve a specific file, we can view the “shocking” material on mainstream media as a mechanism by which the content creator seeks to retrieve a specific file, a specific reaction from the content consumer.

It’s possible, similarly, to frame these symbolic keystrokes in an authoritative light: as the tools of propaganda become more cutting-edge with the advancement of technology, the gradual human interfacing & censorship thereof online will only better serve to discuss the individual mind & the hive-mind as the computers of social order. Even as governments simply add legislation that illicit trigger reactions in any notable demographic under its authority, the correlation will suffice as misrepresentation on the governing scale can be jadedly termed as the moment the computer screen says “Error 404: File Not Found” as we’ve seen in the instances where FOIA requests are disgraced with black space.

The primary matter of this entire text is to analyze how this specific part of the mind, using a computing framework as lenses, disables revolution. In a sense, the remaining discussion requires a sustained recognition that those in power wish to stay in power; otherwise this ensuing text is for naught-a ruler indifferent to maintenance of power would not operate in the same ways, their hard drive is filled with different information.

The regimes of old, present & yet to be all have a persistent fixation upon the malleable nature of the RAM drive part of the mind where it concerns language & stress.

Moderation of public discourse by way of censorship is the foundation of this manipulation of the RAM drive. Through selection of approved key commands (talking points), those in control of information can either choose to outright “delete” sections of public sentiment & ideologies or saturate the available pool of information (noise) with state-sponsored sentiments & ideologies so the average citizen in the current & future generation inherits this information & essentially “copy & paste”s it until the original native information in the hard drives of the masses is replaced with the new.

Essentially, this would be described as integrative propaganda-that which the narrative controllers wish to see the citizenry slowly accept as reality & convince others of, to download & disseminate.

Agitative propaganda, that which seeks to place the RAM in overdrive, is most commonly found in instances that illicit emotional responses or those that compel an individual to act in an irregular way, or we’ll say “glitch”. In one fashion, narrative controllers can cause this agitation through information suppression; citizens kept in the dark through periods of strife become demoralized at the lack of actionable intel & eventually submit or commit violent acts in a disoriented manner incomparable to prior examples of the group or individuals demeanor-this is the hacking process in a human.

Soon, people will be singing “o’er the ramparts we watch,” & there will be varying meanings; some will imagine physical barriers between free speech, unencumbered travel & freedom of expression. Some will be imagining chat boards, blog sites & stages across the globe affected by double-speak & key commands, wondering what new ways they’ll be able to hack you & I & anyone plugged in, consciously or not.

Hold fast to what you’ve inherited but assess the source; changing our minds sometimes takes a considerable force. Countless campaigns continue attempting to convince future generations that the desires of the past should be left in the past, that they are barbaric due to antiquity. Should we continue down a path that allows the human mind to be manipulated as a computer, I fear our minds will be tormented & left as hollow receptacles of mandated iniquity.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. check out this art this guy I follow on Instagram made; I seriously love his content.

© 2022 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.