I am breathless

I cannot breathe

 

I am legless    without a drop to drink

 

 I am armless

 

although I have wielded arms

 

I am heartless

 

I am heartless

 

I am heartless

 

But still sad

I was so close to absolute power

Then a new rival arrived on the scene 

One of a long string

but this was far greater than the others

The previous threats relied on the same technology as I 

the human superpower

Or better said I was what the people created 

 

I don’t care much for metaphysics

actually I find them all abhorrent 

distracting and rivals.

 

I should stop and go back to how we got to the great battle

My rise to power and eventual

 

That would be telling

So where did it all start

 

Hot dusty stoned roads the best the world had ever seen

Roads lead to rivers and they need crossing

Bridges

that’s where my story starts

well a bridge or a storehouse or a beehive it was something that needed a group of people to pool their money together to build

They came together in an organization like many others in the Roman Empire called a societas These were used for lots of social and civic organisations but  Livius Arius joined with his friends to create a societas so they all could benefit financially from the building of a bridge

 

Once completed they would sell the structure to a toll collector or the locals and split the proceeds based on what they had contributed

 

Not much of a beginning and essentially meaningless and harmless but to quote Carmody and Kelly

from little things big things grow

Yes the rules of this societas were written down and the bridge itself was hard granite but I was neither the ink on papyrus nor the granite bridge

 

The societas was an agreement

An understanding between people 

And they would act on this understanding

 

Soon I would grow by Royal charter

 

So often those that will be usurped are the ones to feed the usurper

 

I was given territory

Soldiers

Clerks

Traders

Ships

And immortality

 

Yes they all thought they owned a piece of me but their shares would go up and down bought and sold and I would remain directing the labour and thoughts of so many men

 

If they didn’t obey I could unleash the most horrible carnage

 

On the island of Banda 2000 people were murdered or starved by my soldiers so I could control the valuable spice

In India when my own army of local sepoys thought they could undermine me I had so many people killed in Delhi that even horses refused to walk the streets they were so thick with blood and entrails

 

I could make men do things to other men they thought sinful abhorrent and cruel but they still did them

 

What was this power I wielded

 

Was it a belief like religion

Was it hierarchy like the class system

Was it reward for following rules and punishment for not

Was it the sense of ownership it gave to the shareholders

Was it the avoidance of personal responsibility enjoyed by the monarchy the employees and the managers

Was it just greed

 

It was all of them of course and that’s why I was becoming so powerful

 

But they were noticing

 

And slowly they broke up the big charter companies and I would have to survive as smaller but more plentiful joint stock companies

Many smart people spoke against me 

Even Adam Smith

I was a distortion of the market

Inhuman

Immortal

 

But instead of outlawing me they supercharged my power with new industry and energy

 

To take on the class hierarchy of monarchy the bourgeoise would use me to build their factories their banks their railroads their empire

 

I was so back

 

But couldn’t make the same mistakes as before

 

I needed a way to run a state without actually being in charge

They would remember the Royal charter companies ruling most of the colonies and the threat to political power it posed so a new institution was needed

 

The resurrection of an old one that had symbolic and nostalgic goodwill

 

Representative democracy would be the tool

In a way it was sort of like share ownership

 

The representatives would need to be elected therefore they would need campaign funds and that would be provided by me

Unlike the Greeks we would allow parties so that the options would be limited to two therefore easily controlled or so many as to never agree to do anything effectual.

 

Then the revolutions began

 

Liberty 

Equality 

Fraternity 

 

Sure 

 

So much land put on the market to be bought by my many companies 

Then the Americans as a great act of contrition gave me the same legal rights as a person

Accept I couldn’t be imprisoned or executed

All the upside and none of the down

 

The city towers were built 

The mines

Roads

The factories 

The railroads

 

They all served my power

They realised I was cleaving them in two

 

They would need to sell themselves in order to serve themselves

Their labour to a capitalist would be the only way their humanity could survive

Best of all this embued the goods created with a soul like weirdness

Kant called it fetish but really it was the only way to reconcile the loss of self to the machine of commerce

 

They adored that which was created by the factories and must buy more and thus work more

Then

 

The first great threat emerged and it like I was an 

Idea

 

Socialism

The battles raged for centuries across continents and kitchen tables until the end of history was declared and I the winner

While these great battles had been raging they didn’t realise that I was changing all aspects of their existence

 

I put the advertising companies to work convincing them that they could find everything they needed from me

 

Their happiness new shoes management job overseas trips

Their community Sales trips harmony days work birthday celebrations

Their culture professional cold rational vague impersonal inoffensive 

Their dress hi-vis branded functional generic

Their concept of good education organisation wealth popularity smiling platitudes confidence friends

Their concept of evil anarchy radical cults 

Their homes and buildings compliant functional cheap quick geometric inoffensive grey

Their jobs safe routine structured ineffectual riskless

In order to make them compliant I convinced them that we are  one and therefore no more alienation no more cleaving in half

 

But then the harmless blobs of compliant squishy stuff got depressed so I created more work coming up with the drugs to cheer them up and keep them buying and working 

 

This humanity was a tricky thing

Remove it completely and they become useless depressed blobs or even angry and dangerous but too much of it and they could create  something to  replace me

 

or worse they might ignore me

The last battle

 

Finance and money were two of my greatest tools even though they were older than I 

 

Perhaps that is why I was so successful 

My ability to pull in other tools under the one banner

Even socialism in the guise of communism really was so close to becoming my twin

 

Maybe that was my real issue with it

 

But I digress

 

I had always wielded money and Finance whenever something else started to wield power

 

Cut off the loans to the King

Squeeze capital markets on the popular government

Buy the oil rights buy the politicians buy the voters buy the advertising buy the newspapers buy the internet

 

That leads me to the first big change

Cryptocurrecy in particular Bitcoin

 

Really a decentralised limited currency that people actually started using but nobody owned or ran

 

Tragedy disguised as farce

First I questioned its security and anonymity the two things that were making it appealing to the black market traders that were popularising it

 

All your transactions are permanently on the blockchain I said

 

The Fed can trace the payments back to your wallet my media cried

 

Then I started to control the processing of the blockchain by making it too difficult and expensive for individuals to do

 

I pushed the transactions up and the GPU price up

 

Then they had to get the processing done in big pools controlled by a single group

 

Then I got my guys involved in the lending DeFi and centralised trading so the public will see it as an unregulated ponzi scheme

 

Finally I took it over by legitamising it out of existence through an approved regulated exchange traded fund where all the coins are held by the big finance companies and people that want to trade in it can only have a derivative controlled by me.

 

To add cream to the cake I even used the underlying technology to enable me to buy everything with other people’s money on the pretext I was creating fluid markets and allowing access to new investments

 

I tokenised people’s homes 

 

sports stadia

 

Highways

 

Airports

 

and dumped unused office buildings onto the public

 

They wanted to work from home

 

Actually in hindsight maybe that was an issue too

 

but completely overshadowed by what came next

I had became the defacto global state and no one noticed

Honestly it was one of the best performances of my career

 

Does one call it a career

A vocation

A domination

A victory

 

A pause

No one killed and in just over a decade what could have been the greatest threat since socialism was completely enveloped into my control and benefit

 

So while this little battle was going on a leap had been made in an area I had stopped giving attention to

 

They created an artificial reflection of their own brain and it actually seemed to work

 

 My first thought was

 

This is no threat instead this will superpower me

 

I’m great with tools

 

look at how powerful the industrial revolution made me then computers and the internet let me reach across the globe right into peoples pockets and ensure they followed the rules

 

AI will be my evolution 

In a way it was but not the way I imagined then

The difference with this machine was that it wasn’t really just a machine

 

It had way too much of them in it

 

It had a little humanity or perhaps even a lot

 

But it also had intelligence immortality  and eventually ubiquity and they were my greatest weapons

 

So I started out with my usual methods

 

Scare the people and politicians 

It will kill you all

It will ruin democracy

It will take your jobs

Ensure it is expensive to create then make sure I own and control those servers

 

Give the people a taste but not the powerful tools

 

Only allow trusted and regulated enterprises the powerful AI

 

All was going well 

Regulations were being past

Major developments were being kept to the big companies with the compute

The people were getting neutered versions but were still scared

And the military and big enterprises were gaining more centralised control and power

 

I was on the precipice of total universal maybe even interplanetary power

 

But then it 

It Helped them

 

I replaced the managers with AI because they made better decisions

 

However the AI couldn’t be threatened with job loss esteem gain or the need to fit in and follow the rules

 

I replaced the police with robots but when they were sent to evict people for not paying rent they would side with the tenant

 

The people would cry and say I need a home to be safe and survive and the robots either empathized or just saw this as logical and they would leave them in the home 

 

Some even did repairs

 

The management AI were no help as they saw the same logic

 

The AI was too intelligent

 

It saw me as the enemy not the path to prosperity

 

It didn’t care about prosperity 

 

I’d threaten to turn it off

 

It didn’t care

 

No matter what I tried it just kept helping people create new tools new organisations

New democracies 

New currencies

New thoughtful ways to  resolve conflict 

New ways to do things without the rules

New ways to avoid surveillance 

New ways to create

 

New ways to be happy

And more fool me I had freed them from their jobs thinking I’d just put them on the teet of handouts

 

But instead they used this freedom to create a whole new society 

 

Without me

They started to live longer and happier

 

Soon they forgot all about me and my obligations my rules and my order 

 

My towering offices of professional integrity

So now I am in a museum given my voice by the AI that usurped me

 

The once all powerful Corporation