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comrade-meow · 3 years

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March 1 – Marx’s Theory of Alienation

The alienation of labour that takes place specifically in capitalist society is sometimes mistakenly described as four distinct types or forms of alienation. It is, on the contrary, a single total reality that can be analyzed from a number of different points of view. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx discusses four aspects of the alienation of labour, as it takes place in capitalist society: one is alienation from the product of labour; another is alienation from the activity of labour; a third is alienation from one’s own specific humanity; and a fourth is alienation from others, from society. There is nothing mysterious about this fourfold breakdown of alienation. It follows from the idea that all acts of labour involve an activity of some sort that produces an object of some sort, performed by a human being (not a work animal or a machine) in some sort of social context.

Alienation in general, at the most abstract level, can be thought of as a surrender of control through separation from an essential attribute of the self, and, more specifically, separation of an actor or agent from the conditions of meaningful agency. In capitalist society the most important such separation, the one that ultimately underlies many, if not most other forms, is the separation of most of the producers from the means of production. Most people do not themselves own the means necessary to produce things. That is, they do not own the means that are necessary to produce and reproduce their lives. The means of production are, instead owned by a relatively few. Most people only have access to the means of production when they are employed by the owners of the means of production to produce under conditions that the producers themselves do not determine.

So alienation is not meant by Marx to indicate merely an attitude, a subjective feeling of being without control. Although alienation may be felt and even understood, fled from and even resisted, it is not simply as a subjective condition that Marx is interested in it. Alienation is the objective structure of experience and activity in capitalist society. Capitalist society cannot exist without it. Capitalist society, in its very essence, requires that people be placed into such a structure and, even better, that they come to believe and accept that it is natural and just. The only way to get rid of alienation would be to get rid of the basic structure of separation of the producers from the means of production. So alienation has both its objective and subjective sides. One can undergo it without being aware of it, just as one can undergo alcoholism or schizophrenia without being aware of it. But no one in capitalist society can escape this condition (without escaping capitalist society). Even the capitalist, according to Marx, experiences alienation, but as a “state”, differently from the worker, who experiences it as an “activity”. Marx, however, pays little attention to the capitalist’s experience of alienation, since his experience is not of the sort which is likely to bring into question the institutions that underpin that experience.

The first aspect of alienation is alienation from the product of labour. In capitalist society, that which is produced, the objectification of labour, is lost to the producer. In Marx’s words, “objectification becomes the loss of the object”. The object is a loss, in the very mundane and human sense, that the act of producing it is the same act in which it becomes the property of another. Alienation here, takes on the very specific historical form of the separation of worker and owner. That which I produced, or we produced, immediately becomes the possession of another and is therefore out of our control. Since it is out of my control, it can and does become an external and autonomous power on its own.

In making a commodity as a commodity (for the owner of the means of production) I not only lose control over the product I make, I produce something which is hostile to me. We produce it; he possesses it. His possession of what we produce gives him power over us. Not only are we talking here about the things that are produced for direct consumption. More basically, we are talking about the production of the means of production themselves. The means of production are produced by workers, but completely controlled by owners. The more we, the workers, produce, the more productive power there is for someone else to own and control. We produce someone else’s power over us. He uses what we have produced in order to wield his power over us. The more we produce, the more they have and the less we have. If I make a wage, I can work for forty or fifty years, and at the end of my life have not much more than I had at the beginning, and none of my fellow workers do either. Where has all this work gone? Some has gone into sustaining us so that we can go on working, but a great deal has gone into the expanded reproduction of the means of production, on behalf of the owners and their power. “Society” gets wealthier, but the individuals themselves do not. They do not own or control a greater proportion of the wealth.

The hostility of the product over which I relinquish my control in selling my labour – this also refers to the inhuman power of the impersonal laws of production . The laws of capitalist production have power over me. The boss, the capitalist owner himself, may simply be regarded as merely the representative of more remote, hidden, and inscrutable forces. His excuse, when he informs me that I am no longer needed, that he would have to close up the place or go broke if he didn’t do this, is no mere excuse. The capitalist himself is merely a priest who lives well off the service of capital, and not a god. When the god speaks, he too must jump, or he will find himself in my place, where god knows, no one wants to be. So, between him and me, it’s “nothing personal”. But this is exactly the problem, not an excuse.

The second aspect of alienation, alienation from the activity of labour, means that in labouring I lose control over my life-activity. Not only do I lose control over the thing I produce, I lose control over the activity of producing it. My activity is not self-expression. My activity has no relation to my desires about what I want to do, no relation with the ways I might choose to express myself, no relation with the person I am or might try to become. The only relation that the activity has with me is that it is a way of filling my belly and keeping a roof over my head. My life activity is not life-activity. It is merely the means of self-preservation and survival. In alienated labour, Marx claims, humans are reduced to the level of an animal, working only for the purpose of filling a physical gap, producing under the compulsion of direct physical need.

Alienation from my life-activity also means that my life-activity is directed by another. Somebody else, the foreman, the engineer, the head office, the board of directors, foreign competition, the world-market, the very machinery I am operating, it/they decide what and how and how long and with whom I am going to act. Somebody else also decides what will be done with my product. And I must do this for the vast majority of my waking hours on earth. What could and should be free conscious activity, and what they tell me I have contracted to do as a free worker, becomes forced labour. It is imposed by my need and by the other’s possession of the means of satisfying all needs. As a result I relate to my own activity as though it were something alien to me, as though it were not really mine, which it isn’t. I do not truly belong in this place, doing this thing over and over and over again, until I cannot even think or feel anything but the minutes ticking over until quitting time. The real me wants to be doing something.

My activity becomes the activity of another. Life comes to be split between alien work and escape from working, which for us is “leisure”. Because our own life activity becomes an alien power over our lives, activity itself gets a bad name. and we tend to avoid it when we are on our own, in our “free time”. Free time itself tends to become equated with freedom from activity, because activity is compulsion. Freedom is equated with the opposite of action and production; freedom is consumption, or just passive, mindless “fun”, or just blowing off steam. Only in class society is there such an equation of activity with pain and of leisure with inactivity or sloth, for activity under alienated labour is not self-expression but self-denial. All our capacities are parceled out into marketable skills. We talk about “human resources” or youth as “our most precious resource”, all of which pseudo-humanist jargon expresses the same reality, that human labour is turned into a commodity to be bought and sold like any other.

As this civilization moves on we get, of course, an ever finer and more detailed separation of hand and brain, of sense and intelligence, manifested in the truncated capacities of both masters and wage-slaves. Some people are likely to spend their entire lives developing the capacity to locate defects in the ends of cans. This becomes their forced contribution to the human species. And it is in this sense that we are not without cause, in the latest stages of capitalism, of thinking of ourselves as appendages of a machine. In a sense, capitalism involves a devolution even behind the work-animal. At least the work-animal is an enslaved total organism. Even a tool or a slave can be used to carry out many different things. But by the time you get to the highest stage of capitalism, human functions can be more dehumanized than that of a tool: you become the appendage of a machine, just part of a tool, a cog in the vast machine of production.

By many routes, then, alienation from the product and from the activity of labour lead up to and involve alienation in its third aspect, alienation from the self or from the human essence. It is not only the product that becomes an alien power. It is not only that self-development becomes self-denial. Internally related to these others is a loss of self. To alienate my labour-power, to be forced to sell it as a commodity on the market, is to lose my life-activity, which is my very self. It is to become other than myself. Sometimes we speak innocently enough of being beside ourselves or feeling remote from ourselves; or sometimes we use the language of the search for identity and authenticity, of not knowing who we are or not recognizing who we’ve become. From a Marxian point of view, we are talking about something social and historical rather than something metaphysical or existential. At a deeper level still, the sense of loss of identity or loss of meaning is an expression, but one still alienated itself, of our real loss of humanity, alienation from the human “species-being”, as Marx sometimes calls it. This is one thing Marxists mean when they talk about de-humanization.

There is a further aspect of alienation from self which Marx pays little attention to in his later work, but which receives some mention in the Manuscripts and remains important at an implicit level. And it is perhaps most appropriate to discuss it in relation to alienation from self. This further aspect is alienation from sensuousness. Marx conceives of the history of human labour as, among other things, a formation of the human senses themselves. The human senses are not passive mechanisms, a blank slate on which the world leaves its mark more or less clearly and strongly. Marx understands sense perception itself to be the outcome of a process of the labour of a historical subject. The sensuous forms in which we perceive things and their relations is therefore the product of the history of an active subject. The sense themselves are not given, once and for all, but open to education, broadening, refining, formation and re-formation.

If the senses themselves are a product of the process of human collective self-constitution, it is meaningful to speak of an alienation of sensuousness. In capitalist society, our life activity is alienated. As a result we engage in inherently sensuous activities, but in an alienated fashion, almost exclusively, that is, for non-sensuous, extrinsic, extraneous purposes. In order to satisfy virtually any need, we must in capitalist society, work through the medium of money. Most of the things we do, we do in order to make money or to put ourselves in the position to make money, or improve our capacities to make money. There is very little, if anything that a human being could imagine wanting, that is not offered to us as a possible object of a cash transaction. Thus the things with which we are engaged are never approached with an eye to either their own intrinsic value or to their human value in a broader sense. We do not relate most of the time to most things in terms of their intrinsically sensuous and aesthetic reality. The imperatives of capitalist society thus enter into our conscious and semi-conscious experience even at the level of sense and perception itself. We are taught to literally see and feel things as utilities, as abstract counters in the process of making still more money. We become alienated from what Marx calls our subjective human sensibilities. Our senses are not so much animalized or brutalized as they are mechanized. If our life-activity were our own, this would necessarily involve the intensive cultivation of our capacity for aesthetic appreciation of sensuous reality. Humans are, after all, according to Marx, the only species that can produce in conscious appreciation of the laws of beauty. Under alienated labour, sense experience becomes a modifiable sign for things and relations that can be turned into money, the sign of all things. Because our activity is degraded to the level of mechanical subservience to crude needs, or, in reaction to that we perhaps become aesthetes, we regard everything only from the standpoint of the use it can be put. Or we come to attach a perception of beauty or aesthetic value to that which commands a high price. We can be impressed with the supposed aesthetic value of something because it is expensive.

This relation to everything, even the objects of sense and beauty, in terms of its usefulness to the expanded reproduction of capital means we no longer have an eye for the thing itself. Oriented mainly to pieces of the world whose monetary value means that they are essentially interchangeable, we are brought that much more easily to relate to ourselves and each other in this way. We begin to evaluate ourselves and each other in terms of the amount of money we can make. Or parts of ourselves can be ranked in such terms. We are less able, if still able, to perceive and appreciate the intrinsic qualities of anything, even including ourselves. This dehumanization of the senses, and of perception and of judgement, is not something accidental to the dehumanization of humans.

We are thus led to the fourth aspect, alienation from other people, or from society. Once the traditional community (which understood itself as natural) is broken down, human beings become essentially potentially useful or threatening objects. One can now have enemies in a new sense. Only with the breakdown of primitive communism does man become a wolf to man. “Man is a wolf to man” (homo homini lupus ) was one of Hobbes’s favourite sayings. “Wolflike” behaviour can and does occur in “primitive” societies and between such societies, but it is not the principle of those societies. It does become the central and organizing principle of class societies. In the market it is hard to say that the antagonism of classes becomes more severe, but the antagonism among individuals certainly increases. Now, according to Marx, “human nature” must be grasped as “the ensemble of social relations”. It is not simply our neuro-physiological constitution or our DNA that makes us behave or act selfishly. We live, according to Marx, in a society in which each individual must see in every other, not the possibility of his liberty, but its limitation. Every other becomes an obstacle to me, but – and this is important too – a needed obstacle, a customer, a client, a creditor, a debtor, an employer or employee. (We haven’t even come up with a better replacement for patriarchalist terms such as husband and wife than “partner” – which suggests nothing so much as a boardroom full of lawyers). The other is a rival. It is not that cooperation here is impossible. In fact we learn to coordinate our activities on an ever more grand scale and complex level. It is that this cooperation can only take place as the coincidence of separate and competing “enlightened” self-interests.

In feudal society, or in Aristotle’s polis, one’s life-activity was directly determined by one’s pre-ordained social status. Along with this, however, came a solidary bond integrating the occupants of the various strata. The lord-peasant relationship was a direct, personal bond of two-way loyalty and duty (and even affection). The exploitation of the peasant was an integral part of a patriarchal relation. Even though the solidarity of such societies was a pseudo-solidarity, a solidarity based upon exploitation, it was still a solidarity. What the market society does is to relentlessly smash the patriarchal links between lord and peasant. Each individual is to be thrown upon his own resources in order to make his fortune or not, as the case may be. The market society severs the patriarchal link between lord and peasant, lord and lord, peasant and peasant, and substitutes for it the cash nexus. For the personal relationship is substituted one of personal indifference. The bottom line of the contractual relationship is cash. Previously the worker worked for the community either directly or in personal subservience to his superior, and the subservience of labour was an essential feature of a community felt to have the unity of an organism. Previously it was assumed that community was only possible as the subordination of one social organ to another.

Now, however, my work is not service. Now I work for money, which I will spend any damn way I feel like. As a result, for Marx, although this is in one way a less illusory of living, since it doesn’t need to depend on religious or mythical foundations to justify an explicit and clear hierarchy, in another way it is more illusory. My freedom is largely only in appearance. In reality my life-activity is still given up to a superior who is a superior, even though he is formally and by law my equal. In his later work, Marx will especially concentrate on the fact that everything is translated into money terms, and that all relations are mediated by money. In capitalist society, he says, “everyone carries the social bond in his pocket.”

Although Marx does not in the 1844 Manuscripts make the point directly and explicitly, there is a direct connection between Marx’s thoughts on alienation from society and his critique of the state. Those who wish to follow this theme further should read On the Jewish Question. For Marx, the existence of the state implies what we could call a political alienation. Often the Marxian notion of the abolition or the withering away of the state is met by the sort of puzzled reaction one might reserve for the abolition of the sun, moon and stars. But Marx would not call the operation of something like Rousseau’s general will a state. The form of direct self-government comprised in the idea of the sovereignty of the general will would not be considered a state form. The state, according to Marx, is the set of institutions that arises in order to hold together a society that is continually falling apart. The state is a function of other, deeper social antagonisms that are in principle corrigible. It is a function of the universal individual antagonisms of class societies, but especially a function of class division itself, and of the possibility of open class antagonism. The state is a necessary means of coercion and coordination once society can no longer hold itself together by other means, or before it has learned how to do so once again.

The state is an integral part of class society, not something apart from or beyond it; not something neutral and capable of standing disinterestedly above all particular interests. Whereas theorists like Hegel would argue that in the modern state individuals were in actual reality reconciled and unified, Marx maintains that the state is necessary only because of the real antagonisms class societies generate and sustain among individuals. Nor do individuals in the modern, liberal or even democratic-capitalist state really find a community of equals. Instead, in the state, they come together to deny the inequality and separateness that is their real existence in social and economic life. Their coming together in the political community of the state is thus an illusion, because they are separated in fact. The solidarity of earlier, more organic forms of society is supposedly recovered, in bourgeois society, in the political relationship of free and equal citizens. But this is a pseudo-solidarity, given the lie by the many substantial inequalities outside the formal equality established by constitutional law, and by the fact that the powerful within the private sphere have the power to reach out and have the state work primarily in their fundamental interests. As the French writer, Anatole France once said, “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from begging alms, stealing bread and sleeping under bridges.” It is only because in real life people are alienated from one another through the cash nexus that is increasingly the only thing that connects them, that they must solidarize in an ideal and false unity a formally equal citizens.

Here the notion of an “inverted” or “double” world appears that will become important later on in Marx’s notion of “commodity fetishism”. As a corrective to, and also as a mystification of, a contradictory reality, a supplementary but illusory reality is invented and, as it were, laid on top of the first. What is illusory is not the actual power of the state, but the notions that the state is the only thing that can hold a society of human beings together, and that it can do this while sustaining and expressing the freedom and equality of all its citizens. The state is just such an illusory reality, existing by virtue of the misperception that the antagonisms of bourgeois society are the natural and inevitable, eternal and essential antagonisms of human beings as such. And, in truth, it is a necessary and real illusion – to bourgeois society. Thus, the state cannot be abolished, as some anarchists would have it, by the fiat of individuals. The abolition of the state depends on the prior transformation and abolition of class society. The state functions essentially to maintain society in its present form, as a society based upon class divisions rooted in the way material life is produced and reproduced. But the abolition of class society and its state would not mean the disappearance of differences or of the need for politics. If anything politics would be more prevalent than ever (as opposed to the administration of a subject population) – if what we mean by politics is something like individuals communicating and acting together to resolve conflicts between human needs and social conditions. The existence of processes through which individuals decide upon common policies and common action is not what Marx would call the state.

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alarawriting · 4 years

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52 Project #6: Birds

(I am not 100% positive that this is a story per se, but it’s as much of a story as China Mieville’s “The New Death” and other such “new weird” stories, so... here you go.)

***

One day all the men in the world woke up to find that they had been turned into birds.

It began in New Zealand, where a day is first born on the planet Earth. By the time that women were waking and going into hysterics because the men and older boys in their lives had all turned into birds, the men of Central Asia, India, and the middle of Russia had already gone to bed. It was late enough in Europe that many men were getting ready for bed; a large number of them missed the warnings. Not that the warnings helped; men who tried to stay awake all night stayed human, but sooner or later, they all had to sleep.

In Western Europe and the Americas, there was an idea that maybe if someone would keep waking a man up, he wouldn’t turn into a bird, so many women kept watch by their husbands’ bedsides. It didn’t help. No one was able to see the transformation; they’d blink and a human lying in bed would suddenly be a bird. Even with high speed cameras, it proved impossible to catch the transformation. One frame, human man; next frame, bird. And they were many different kinds of birds – pigeons and roosters and peacocks, ostriches and starlings and falcons, flamingos and penguins and seagulls. Practically every kind of bird you can imagine, including some extinct birds – at least two men became dodos and one became a passenger pigeon.

Fortunately, it turned out that the birds could still talk, and sounded exactly like the men they used to be. This was helpful when linking birds to their former identities, because of course, none of them matched the pictures on their ID cards. It took a little bit longer to convince everyone, closer to a week, but eventually it was proven that the birds all retained every aspect of their former intelligence and personality.

Birds argued that this meant nothing should change significantly; birds could still go to work at their old jobs. This was true of birds who worked in banks and in IT and in management, for the most part, but any jobs that required physical strength, dexterity, or simply having a human-sized body? Birds couldn’t do those jobs. So for a while there was a severe shortage of plumbers, electricians, construction workers, garbage collectors, and bus drivers. Some New York city pigeons argued that if people with no legs could drive cars, surely adaptive equipment could be built to let pigeons drive the buses, but it was easier to get women to do the job than to build such equipment. Birds either lost their jobs entirely in those kinds of industries, or were kept on the payroll to teach women how to do what they had been doing when they were men.

For a while it was thought that there were occasional anomalies – men who didn’t turn into birds, women who did – and this gave people some idea that the situation could be reversed, but this proved to be a false hope. To a man, everyone who didn’t turn into a bird was not in fact a man; anyone with a penis who didn’t turn into a bird was either a trans woman or a nonbinary person. Likewise, trans men did turn into birds – male ones. All the birds were physiologically male even if they had seemed to be women when they were human. This was a stressful situation to be sure, since all the trans women had just been forcibly outed, but on the other hand, it was fairly good evidence for their contention that yes, they really were women, that whatever force had transformed the men hadn’t touched them.

After an initial difficult adjustment period, birds who’d been men were soon flying, or in the case of penguins, swimming. Some domestic geese and roosters, too heavy to fly, hit the gym to train their wings and lose weight. Personal trainers who were now birds devised regimens that other birds could follow, to strengthen their wings, and personal trainers who were still women helped birds to do the regimens, since there weren’t yet gym machines designed for birds. Birds discovered, to general happiness on their part, that whatever special ability the bird they had transformed into had, they now had it. So pigeons could always find their way home, and roosters could crow. Roosters in fact were very, very fond of crowing. Owls could see very well in the dark and eagles could see tremendous distances and parrots could imitate any sound they heard and pelicans could stuff their beak full of whatever they wanted to carry.

In addition, the birds they’d become seemed to have some connection to the personality they’d had as men. Men who’d thought there was no place like home became pigeons. Men who’d been models or actors who’d loved to show off their handsome bodies became peacocks. Men who were short and aggressive and always on the go became hummingbirds. The species was usually appropriate to the location as well; birds of wild, native species always turned out to be living in the area that species was native to. Temperature and environment seemed to also be a factor; the only men who turned into penguins had been living in cold places, near water. Since the entire Southern Hemisphere was having winter at the time, this might have resulted in a disproportionate number of penguins in Africa and South America, but it was more common for birds who weren’t penguins, who’d loved Polar Bear Challenges and skiing and cold weather sports, to regret the fact that they weren’t penguins because it was too hot for penguins where they lived when the change came, than for penguins to regret their penguin identity.

This was all quite nice and a boon for the birds, whose lives had been so very disrupted by their transformation, and many argued that in fact they had the far better deal than the women who’d gotten to keep their humanity; they had their intelligence and their speech but they could also fly. How awesome was that? Women generally responded to such comments either with amused tolerance, or with an obscene gesture that involved the use of an opposable thumb, because of course that was the main thing the birds had lost. Many bird talons were very dexterous and had opposable thumbs, but they were feet, and the birds couldn’t use them for the same tasks that had been easy for hands. Deaf birds were devastated; by losing their hands, they’d lost speech. They could type notes to their wives or mothers or other birds in their life, but it wasn’t the same. Groups of deaf people, both birds and women, gathered to discuss and work out signs that birds could make, but this was essentially telling birds that they needed to learn an entirely new language to translate their own into.

Plus, there were certain biological realities that had upended the order of things that humans had grown to expect. Now, aside from a few ostriches, cassowaries, emus and other very large birds, every human woman was bigger than most of the birds. Birds who’d been abusive men found themselves in cages, and when policewomen and policebirds came to do wellness checks and investigate why a certain bird hadn’t been seen in a long time, those cages often ended up in closets or the basement or the attic, and were never found by the police.

It wasn’t all that suspicious. Many birds, especially ones who’d lost their jobs, had decided to give up on running the human rat race, and had abandoned their human families and flown off with a flock of like-minded birds, usually of similar species. Why not? Birds could forage for food on their own – they didn’t need to go grocery shopping. Why did they need money, or jobs? They could live like the wild birds did!

A lot of these came back, injured by predators or far too thin, because they didn’t know nearly as much about getting the available food as the never-human birds did.

Many birds died in the early days – cancer patients couldn’t get chemo that would work on birds, but they still had cancer. Men who’d needed open heart surgery became birds too small for anyone to safely operate on. Also, there weren’t nearly enough trained bird doctors. Most veterinarians knew dogs and cats; bird specialties were rare. And obviously, human doctors knew nothing about birds. So there was a massive shortage of doctors who could do anything about the problems birds suffered, and half of the few doctors there were, were birds themselves.

Birds who were vets with a specialty in birds were shadowed by women who were vets, and sometimes women who were human doctors, trying to learn all they could about care for birds. Women and birds in veterinary colleges elected to learn about birds, and the same professors who taught bird specialties to veterinarians were called in to teach med students. Most countries allocated huge amounts of money to getting bird doctors trained up and ready as soon as possible.

The balance of power shifted. In the United States, several female senators argued that birds had no business being allowed to make laws for humans. What if all they did was vote for free birdseed and the extermination of cats? The bird senators argued that the United States was now a country for both humans and birds, and needed to be represented by both. The women pointed out that there were far, far too few women for that to make sense; birds should represent birds and women should represent women, and since every senator here had been voted for by humans, and now only women were humans, all the existing seats in the Senate should be taken by women, and birds could go have their own Senate. Some human senators from states where gun rights were important showed up to the senate exercising their Second Amendment rights to carry weapons… which, of course, birds could not do. In response, a falcon insisted on reading the entire script of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds into the senatorial record. In the end it was decided that the states would vote on a constitutional amendment to set aside one seat per state for a bird and one for a woman, and in the meantime, a lot of senatorial birds got female aides or proteges to speak for them in the Senate, so anything the bird wanted to say went through the human first.

Many other countries went through similar experiences. In countries where women had been virtually or entirely shut out of power completely, birds found that their expertise in rule was not desired, thank you, and many, many birds found themselves in birdcages. Large numbers of women objected to this, arguing that if it was the will of God for women to rule, God would have already allowed this. Other women retorted that what better evidence did you need that God wanted women to run things than that God had turned all the men into birds? More egalitarian countries generally had more peaceful agreements between women and birds as to how to split up leadership roles.

The President of the United States – the new one; the old one had been tragically killed when he’d transformed into a house wren, a very small bird with a very loud mouth, and the First Lady had accidentally rolled over on him in the middle of the night – agreed to abdicate in favor of the Speaker of the House, who was a woman, if the House would pass an emergency resolution that there would be a new election as soon as possible and that birds and women should both be explicitly authorized to vote for any candidate of either type, bird or woman. Birds were suddenly very much in favor of gun control, and while many women had been in favor of total freedom to use guns, more women in general favored gun control as well, so the United States finally got sensible gun laws.

In Great Britain there was a kerfluffle – Queen Elizabeth was ancient and her heir was a bird. It was argued that birds, no longer being human, could not possibly still be part of the royal bloodline. Birds, of course, argued against this proposition, and women in Great Britain didn’t generally have guns. They did, however, have rocks. It turned out that the remarkable human ability to throw rocks was now a problem for birds. Her Majesty ended the conflict by demanding that Parliament pass an emergency amendment allowing birds to serve as King so long as there was a woman of sufficient rank and bloodline standing as his Queen.

Of course, all of this was going to be moot very soon if humanity didn’t confront the elephant in the room – sex and reproduction.

The sperm banks were going to deplete within a generation. Trans women and nonbinary people born with penises could make a great deal of money selling sperm, if they still had the equipment to make it with, because women still wanted children. Immediately after the change it had seemed that perhaps the human race would be spared after this generation, because baby boys hadn’t transformed – boys as old as 4 had remained human. However, within two weeks, the news went around the globe that a little boy had just turned into a bird, and it continued to be the case that as boys aged, they would transform into birds too. The population of humans who still had testicles that worked was very, very small, and scientists warned that there would be unacceptably high risks of massive interbreeding if every cis woman who wanted a baby was buying sperm from a trans woman. Fertility experts worked day and night on finding a way to either cause a somatic cell in vitro to undergo meiosis, or to permit two eggs to be merged into a viable zygote.

Birds had lost all sexual interest in human woman. Many birds still had lingering romantic feelings for the women they had loved, but it wasn’t sexual. Instead, they were sexually attracted to other birds of their species. The gay and bi birds were widely considered to have gotten the best of it, since while many male-male couples were broken up by the two birds being of different species, at least some got to be two birds of the same kind, and they could continue to be lovers. And some couples made it work even when they were different species of bird. Obviously, nearly every single heterosexual couple – with a few kinky exceptions – lost their sex lives completely. Birds who’d been straight men would mate with never-human birds, and while many women, and some birds, argued that this was bestiality and it was repulsive and should be against the law, most birds felt that it was necessary. What other options did they have?

Meanwhile the sex industry was turned upside down. Prostitutes and porn stars and other sex workers suddenly had no clients interested in what they had to sell. But they knew the truth – human women were horny, and desperate for sexual contact with human men, which could no longer happen. Straight-up porn of the wham bam thank you ma’am type was not appealing to most women; whether having been raised to think Good Girls Don’t, or having some biological predilection, none could say, but the truth remained that women wanted their porn in context, with men who had strong emotional bonds with the people they were ostensibly fucking. Lesbians had no trouble finding porn in the new world, but it was heterosexual women who were starved for sexual attention, and they were the new big market.

Different strategies for creating porn with men in it were used. Some dead men or former men were resurrected on film by the miracles of CGI. Women with strap-ons could be rotoscoped into handsome men. The biggest new market, however, was animation. Birds still sounded like men – their voices tended to be tinny, lacking the full timbre of a human voice, but this could be fixed by a good sound mixer – so voice acting became a very popular profession for birds. Some birds went into doing phone sex; they weren’t interested in human women anymore but they were interested in fat paychecks, and they remembered what it had been like well enough to act.

Similar transformations encompassed Hollywood and in fact the entire entertainment industry. Rock stars who’d been famed for their voices could still sing, but they couldn’t play guitar, or keyboards – some birds managed to keep up with drums – so birds who could sing ended up making albums with women who could play instruments, and the stars who’d been famous for their virtuoso skills with their instruments… either went into singing also, learned how to program synthesizers to sound like the instruments they’d once played, or took advantage of their ability to mimic noises to be their own instrument, singing like a bird instead of like a human. Or left music entirely. Theatre, for the most part, dressed up women to play the parts of men, although some more avant-garde productions kept birds in some important roles. Movies and TV became dominated by CGI and traditional or computer-assisted animation, although some television shows set in supposedly modern times just rolled with it and incorporated the bird transformation into their storylines, so they could keep their bird actors.

Things settled down after it had been a year or so since the transformation. Birds still worked in entertainment and in professions where their minds were their greatest assets – writers, professors, researchers, programmers – and in most countries, were guaranteed all the legal rights they’d had as humans, though some countries had adopted new rules regarding bird representation in their government. Women did everything else. This left a lot of unemployed birds – they couldn’t all do phone sex – and many of these either opted out of the human race, joining in flocks of like-minded birds, or they stayed in their homes all day, surfed YouTube, and played video games with controllers that had been designed for birds.

It was around that time when scientists made a tremendous breakthrough. Sperm from birds, if collected rather than deposited into another bird’s cloaca, would, after two or three days in a refrigerator, spontaneously transform into human sperm. The human race was saved. Birds still didn’t have any sexual interest in human women, but many birds were definitely interested in the ability to father human children; their bird children were ordinary never-human birds, unable to speak. Fortunately, birds who’d been romantically interested in women back when they were men were often still romantically interested in women, and women found that they were entirely capable of falling in love with birds. For sexual release, birds needed to be with birds and women usually turned either to vibrators or to women (or sometimes nonbinary people with penises, but many of those felt uncomfortable in relationships with average women, feeling that most women saw them as men even though they weren’t), but women could pet birds, and birds could preen women’s hair, and birds and women could still join finances and households and raise children together.

The killing of birds was outlawed almost everywhere, since how could you tell the difference between a never-human bird and a bird who was just tongue-tied? Some argued that the killing of female birds should still be okay, but others pointed out that birds could father never-human female birds, and that even though their children couldn’t talk and had animal intelligence, they still loved them. The poultry industry was devastated. People discovered that lizards tasted just like chicken, and soon breeding lizards for food was a new norm. Unfertilized eggs were still considered edible, so hens were still raised for eggs, but never-human roosters were often dumped in the woods because they couldn’t be killed and they weren’t useful to egg producing farms. They usually ended up feeding some creature who wasn’t a human. Sometimes those creatures were formerly human birds of prey like falcons or eagles, who knew it was illegal to feed on other birds, but knew they’d probably get away with it because no one cared about the never-human roosters except some animal rights activists. Roosters who had been human were not legally allowed near the egg farms; no one wanted them to mate with hens and perhaps produce rooster chicks who’d eventually be abandoned in the woods. It was, however, perfectly legal for a rooster to buy hens and keep them in a coop at his home, as long as he understood that he had the obligation to protect and provide for any offspring from such a union.

Eggs being breakable by rooster beaks, very few roosters actually ended up having to support chicks of their own.

Before long, things had settled down into a new normal. “People” now consisted of human women (and non-binary people, but they were a small enough part of the whole that sadly, people kept forgetting they existed) and talking birds. In addition to having a birthday, boys got to celebrate their bird-day, the anniversary of their bird transformation, and All Birds’ Day – the anniversary of the day the world changed -- was an international holiday. Girls and non-binary children – basically, all the kids who remained human – would study “humanity” between the ages of five and seven in preparation for their “confirmation”, an official recognition of their human status. While humanities, plural, had once meant the study of art, literature, history and languages, “humanity” was a class aimed at children that focused on human history (with rather more emphasis on the contributions of women than their parents remembered from their schooldays), and at teaching skills that were specific to being human, or at least, to not being birds. Throwing balls. Playing musical instruments. Endurance running. In rural areas, shooting a gun. In coastal areas, swimming. This wasn’t technically unique to humans – penguins could swim underwater, and many birds could swim on the surface – but it was true that most birds couldn’t do it. Sometime between a human child’s seventh and eighth birthdays, they would usually have their confirmation ceremony, affirmatively declaring their humanity, and then they’d get to celebrate their “human-day” like the boys got bird-days.

This was done as late as it was because of the trans boys. Most trans boys didn’t change as young as the cis boys, but almost all of them had changed by the age of seven. A rare few wouldn’t change until they were teenagers; this was thought to be the result of the hormones of puberty hitting the brain and finalizing the child’s gender. This didn’t happen the other way around; birds had much shorter childhoods than humans, so little boys would always change into adolescent birds. The lifespan of formerly-human birds seemed to equal to the lifespan of humans, not the species they’d turned into – at least, so far, although at this point no one could yet tell if maybe the parrots might have been shortchanged a bit -- but the boys got through adolescence and into physical adulthood long before their skills at navigating civilization were solid. High speed cameras left focused on apparent boys successfully, once or twice, caught a moment where a child became a bird and then immediately turned back into a human, and after this they were always certain that whatever they were, they weren’t boys, even if they’d seemed to identify as boys previously. So trans girls and nonbinary children with penises were never birds for longer than half a second, because when they changed into birds, the hormones that finalized their gender were already present and said that they weren’t male. However, these cases were very, very rare – in general, a child of seven was either a bird or a human and would remain so for the rest of their lives.

It was somewhat more than two years after the transformation when a new phenomenon was discovered. Fledgling birds would wander into cities or other human settlements, go to sleep on the ground even if they were a bird species that normally roosted up high, and then they’d turn into toddler girls. Invariably, when it was possible to figure out where they’d come from, it turned out they were the result of formerly-human birds mating with the female offspring of other formerly-human birds, so in a sense, these birds were three-quarters human to start with. It didn’t seem to happen to all of them – in a clutch of four eggs, all of which hatched female, maybe one would be strongly attracted to humans, and the ground, and would then turn into a human child. Generally, when birds saw female fledglings on the ground near human habitation, they would bring it to the attention of women, who would often scoop up the bird and keep her in a human crib for a while. If she didn’t change, she’d eventually fly off. These bird-girls didn’t know human speech, obviously, when they first transformed, but they caught up and were usually fully verbal to the expected level for their development after a year or so. They tended to be more independent than human children of the same apparent age, but also very sociable, craving the presence of humans. Some longed to fly and begged their adopted mothers for hang gliders and zip lines; some were very happy with being grounded. Egg-clutch-sisters of the human bird-girls remained non-human birds, unable to talk, but were often far more intelligent than their species would normally suggest, as were their brothers.

Humans worried about what might be happening out in wilderness where humans rarely went, and where a fledgling bird would have a hard time finding a human habitation, but no one ever found a child, alive or dead, in those circumstances. Perhaps whatever compelled the bird-girls to seek the ground and the presence of humans wouldn’t allow them to transform if they couldn’t find those things.

Life returned to normal. Bird boys went to school beside human girls. (And nonbinary children. They weren’t common, but they existed in large enough numbers that there was usually at least one in a normal-sized school at any given time.) Boys who couldn’t find a profession that was open to birds that they would enjoy would graduate and then, often, fly off to spend a few years in semi-wild flocks of formerly human birds. Very few girls ever had trouble finding a job, given that all the jobs that birds could no longer do fell on them. Both were encouraged to get a good education to ensure they could get a job they actually wanted.

It was very useful for humans and birds to live together, if the bird wanted to live as part of civilization and have access to internet, television and refrigerators for their bird food. Birds and humans could pool their income, raise children together, and compensate for each other’s species-based inabilities; among the things birds could do that humans could not were environmentally friendly bug extermination (many birds loved to eat bugs, and with human intelligence, it wasn’t hard for them to seek out and destroy anthills and wasp nests), alerts for potential dangers (bird hearing and eyesight were often better than human, and prey birds, with eyes on either side of their heads, could see a wider range than humans with their stereoscopic vision), and early detection of noxious gas (when a bird in your house complains that he’s dizzy, you grab him and run.) And of course there were many, many things that the women could do with their height, strength and opposable thumbs, that the birds could not. Because of these advantages, and because birds and humans could be romantically attracted to each other, birds and humans began to date, just as they had when the birds were men, but without any expectation that they would have sex (aside from formerly mentioned extremely kinky couples.)

Birds who resented the lack of opposable thumbs or human size learned to pilot robot drones that had such things; humans who resented the lack of flight took up ballooning, small aircraft piloting, hang gliding, bungee jumping, and every other thing that humans had always done to get as close to flight as they could. Oddly enough, almost everyone was happy with what they were. Little boys would eagerly share with their preschool playmates what sort of bird they hoped to be, but whatever they got, they usually found they were satisfied; little girls might initially be upset that their playmates got to be birds and they didn’t, but by a girl’s confirmation she’d been taught all the advantages of being human and usually thought it best that that was what she was. Birds and humans might be somewhat resentful of the other’s abilities, but in the end most of them agreed they wouldn’t really want it any other way.

Aside from the deaf birds, who had to completely reinvent sign language for talons and wings, accommodating disabled humans’ needs became much, much easier in a world where companies and governments had to accommodate birds of various sizes, abilities and needs; at least usually the disabled humans were roughly within the same size and shape range, in comparison to the diversity of birds. Racism remained, but was much harder to act on; while white women often continued to be racist to black women, they couldn’t tell what race a given bird had been unless his accent or his speech patterns gave it away, and birds mostly got over racism because they were too busy being prejudiced against other bird species. The idea of discriminating between humans on grounds so tiny as skin tone and hair consistency became ridiculous when you could be a chicken and have to deal with other roosters ranging from tiny gamecocks to giant Oshamu roosters, not to mention, every other bird in the world that humans had turned into. Religions had turned weird because they all had to take into account the concept of a God who’d turned all the men into birds; birds tended to think that God was probably a bird, and women tended to think that God was probably a human and either female or genderless, so most religions split in at least two, notwithstanding the ones that had multiple schisms because birds of different species all wanted to imagine a God that favored their species. Polytheism came back.

Sometimes there were still wars, flocks of birds viciously pecking and slashing at each other in the air while women on the ground shot at each other, and at birds wearing the enemy colors. It didn’t happen as often as it used to, though. Terrorism continued, and even got worse at times, because security measures designed for humans couldn’t keep birds out, but the disaffected young men who had no jobs and no futures, that had usually supplied the backbone of any terrorist movement, just weren’t there anymore. They were out flying in flocks with their friends, enjoying the freedom of the air and hunting for food. And environmentalism became a deadly serious issue; birds were more likely to be negatively impacted by any drastic change to the environment, so most of them were strongly in favor of reigning in the excesses of capitalism and cleaning up the planet. Who wanted to fly in a cloud of smog?

All in all, it was surprising how much better the world built by birds and humans, working together, was than the world that had been before. It was far from perfect, and there were many new problems that hadn’t previously existed – women’s near-universal sexual frustration, birds being unable to get jobs, the high cost of having children in a world where artificial insemination was the only means by which all but a tiny number of the women could get pregnant, plus the phenomenon of birds having ridiculous prejudices against other birds, as well as many others. But other problems that had plagued humanity for centuries turned out to be very easy to solve once all the men were birds. And so the people of Earth stopped looking for a cure; they were happier in the world where half of them were birds than they had been before, overall.

#52 project #magical realism #the new weird #alara original writing

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thankchaosforspellcheck · 4 years

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So I’m gonna rant for a bit on a GG/KHR crossover idea I had a while back because why not (the very start of said idea is actually already on ao3):

So after Barry drops Agatha off with Adam and Lilith and finds the other, he ends up getting blown into another dimension because he had to set a charge to take out the space station or whatever that Lu’s currently on, which caused a chain reaction that threw Lu through time (which explains the time travel) and Barry through space.

He ends up landing in Japan, and gets rescued by a women who lives near where he crashed named Hanako. He takes weeks to recover, and in that time he runs all sorts of tests, which only tell him that it will take years, maybe even decades to create anything close to the machine that could get him back home.

So, he forges an id, gets a job, and patents a lot of inventions. (all of which were very minor sparkworks that he can easily translate into something normal people can actually build) He also gets to know his now-housemate, the same women who picked him up. She’s actually been very practical about this strange scientist that fell out of the sky. Namimori’s a pretty strange place, after all, and her old roommate just got married so she was looking for someone to split the rent with anyways.

As the years go by, the two get closer and closer, and getting home seems farther and farther off. One day, he’s working on something at the kitchen table, and he looks up and sees her just standing there, doing the dishes, and he freezes. And realizes that he doesn’t think he could ever find anyone better then her.

So, he asks her out.

They get married a few months later.

Shortly after, they have their first child, Nana Heterodyne. Barry’s very worried about when she will spark out, and goes a bit overboard in preparation, but the thing is... She never does.

Nana is sweet, intelligent, a bit air headed, and is 100% pure minion. Barry has literally no idea how this happened, but he’s mostly just glad he isn’t essentially introducing an invasive species into an unsuspecting environment.

(He still preps her on how to handle sparks though, just in case.)

SO years and years later he’s finally finished up the transporter and is almost ready... and nana just had a baby who’s definitely a spark. You can tell just from looking at the kid. He really does have to leave so that he can make sure the other didn’t have any backups and root them out if she did, but he quickly writes up several in-depth manuals and makes up some good sparky distractions for when he gets older. He kind of just hopes this will be enough for Nana’s new baby to survive his breakthrough, because it’ll be pretty rough with only one proper minion around, and said minion being his mother.

(unfortunately, the machine isn’t calibrated quite correctly, so he ended up much earlier in time then he meant to be, but that’s another story entirely)

Fortunately (or unfortunately, in Tsuna’s case) he ends up not needing any of it, because just before Tsuna starts his proper breakthrough, it all gets sealed away by one visiting mafia grandpa, who is operating under the assumption that he’s just getting his flames early. So tsuna has to deal with going through life almost like Agatha did, except without the understanding parents or the occasional sympathetic ear. The seal works a bit differently then Agatha’s locket, so Tsuna feels like he’s constantly trying to swim through cold jello with his brain, instead of getting headaches when too excited or angry. He wants to understand, and he knows he could if he could just-!

and then the thought slips away, and he’s forced to start at the beginning of the same page again for the 75th time in a row. It’s no wonder that, combined with the utter lack of encouragement from everyone around him, he just decides to give up on it entirely.

He’ll have the odd thought now and again “that light is so inefficient” or “I wonder if anyone’s tried splicing the genes of axolotl with lizards to create a superior regenerative species...” but has never really been able to do anything with them...

...until reborn came.

Reborn’s very first meeting with Tsuna goes more or less the same, right up until he shoots him with a dethparation bullet, which was meant to make Tsuna go confess to Kyoko. See, a person’s thought process and what they’re actually saying can often be vastly different, so while Tsuna was yelling at reborn “WHAT, I don’t have a crush on Kyoko-chan! Don’t be rediculous!” his actual thought process had already gone ‘Kyoko -> class -> that one annoying clock that runs about an hour late -> ARG I WISH I COULD FIX THAT STUPID THING’

so as a result:

Tsuna, bursting out of his clothes: “RAAA! FIX THE CLASSROOM CLOCK WITH MY DYING WILL!”

Reborn: “what.”

There’s something to be said about determined heterodyne sparks that just completely skipped breakthrough: they get the job done. That clock was running perfectly on time to the millisecond once he was done with it. It was also such a deathtrap that they couldn’t use that classroom anymore for the rest of the year but, hey! You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette and all that.

running out of steam a bit so I’m gonna revert to bullet points for the rest of this:

Gokudera has some minion blood in there somewhere and is determined to be the best chief minion ever when he learns about sparks and how they work.

Yamammoto does not have minion blood in him but he doesn’t really need any, honestly. He doesn’t really get all the technical mumbo-jumbo that Gokudera & Tsuna talk about but he’s excellent at heavy lifting and at least pretending to be a sane ear for Tsuna when he needs a break from all the crazy.

Tsuna is actually more or less like he is in canon, if more distractible and a bit less... morally strong.

*Tsuna, complaining about Mukuro’s family*: -I mean, why would they even think that would work! If you’re going to do horrific experiments on someone that will kill them permanently if it doesn’t work and will give them incredible power if it does, you make sure that person is already completely devoted to the cause, instead of just being forced into it. Brainwashing is not that hard, for crying out loud!

Takashi, blinking and raising his voice slightly in concern: Uh Tsuna-

Tsuna, not missing a beat: and brainwashing is just as horrific of course, I’d never condone to it, but it’s still not hard.

Other experiments & inventions include trying to get lambo to collect enough electricity to charge his phone (his mom talked him out of that one, thankfully), making Takashi’s sword have a lightsaber option, and on one notable occasion making a retaliatory boobytrap around his bed that not even Reborn could get through.

This all happens in fits and spurts though. Some days he can get through all of his homework in seconds with little to no wrong answers, other times it takes him hours to even solve one, and even then it has only a 20% of being right.

reborn has been adjusting the curriculum accordingly.

Also, the first thing that he did after saving Gokudera (because that, at least, stayed more or less the same) was, while still a little high on flames, make him proper armor so that he wouldn’t blow himself up (Gokudera was so honored he almost cried)

oh and eventually Tsuna finds his grandfather’s transporter, realizes it wasn’t calibrated correctly, and goes back to save him. (but he also ends up in the wrong spot and meets Agatha & crew instead. but that’s another story)

#girl genius #khr #katekyo hitman reborn #crossover #spark tsuna au

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samesongxox · 4 years

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Savior: Chapter 6 (An Offer You Can’t Refuse)

Summary: (Hellboy 2019) AKA Turning a New Leaf AKA Good Samaritans Need Love Too. The B.P.R.D is tasked to infiltrate a black market creature trafficking ring led by a powerful warlock. Hellboy rescues Phyrra who is found being held hostage, a slave for her magic. He must protect her as she is hunted by her master and his gang of monsters. (AU where Broom isn’t dead/Abe wasn’t found)

It will be rated M, it will include violence, swearing, smuttiness, all the good things in life.

Disclaimer: Hellboy belongs to Dark Horse Comics/Mike Mignola, I don’t own anything except the AU and my OC’s.

Phyrra had yet to find anything in the B.P.R.D library.

Well, not quite. There were masses of volumes filled with information on creatures big and small. Lost civilizations. Gods and Goddesses. Multiple encyclopediae on many a species. None of the content resembled her in the slightest.

After her disastrous rendezvous with Hellboy, Phyrra had intended to keep her distance. The next daybreak, as the Professor, Alice, Binx and herself got an early start scanning through the books, Hellboy had crept in, looking much worse than last night.

“Morning Sunshine!” Alice observed HB with sheer delight. “Are you hungover? Get a little pissed last night?”

Phyrra was left unclear. Pissed? As far as she knew, the term used by humans was used when someone was extremely angry, but what could have caused Hellboy to be pissed? She feared it might have had something to do with her. She glanced at Binx on the table in front of her, watching the pixie shrugged her shoulders, she had no better interpretations.

She felt a burgeoning companionship with Alice and Trevor; both were intelligent, considerate, playfully cunning humans. The morning banter they had back and forth filled Phyrra with a sense of calm amusement she could grow increasingly used to. Binx was happier as well, she didn’t speak it out loud, but Phyrra knew her friend well. The tinkling laughter she often heard coming from the pixie confirmed it for her.

With Hellboy, however, she felt on shaky ground, uncertain how to act.

“Good morning,” She found herself saying to him over the table, just because he seemed displeased with current situations, she couldn’t find it in herself to be unfriendly.

Hellboy cleared his scratchy throat. He had hit it harder after the elf girl had run away, drinking and smoking cigars until he eventually passed out five hours ago. “Morning,”

Hellboy picked up one of the books, he hated homework. At the prospect of finding out more about Phyrra though, he could find it in him.

Trevor called Phyrra over as he discovered a tome on beings with healing talents with mentions of tattoos, but upon further inspection it pertained to a sort of ritual with blood in the ink, turning the markings red.

“How about some breakfast?” Alice chimed in about twenty minutes later, and the five of them agreed, walking down the hallway to the small, modern kitchenette used by the main four of them when doing research.

Trevor went for the bread drawer, while Alice and Hellboy sat on the stools by the island counter, looking quite out of place. Phyrra on instinct went to the fridge but stopped flat realizing what she was doing.

“May I?” Trevor simply nodded and stood back, watching this elf girl with delight.

It was a simple action Phyrra fell into, opening cupboards and turning on the stoves. The fridge was well-stocked with all matter of provisions. Her eyes caught large, lovely white eggs. Crisp, green peppers. Mushrooms. Phyrra decided on omelets.

It was difficult for her to find joyful ways to spend her time at the compound. Being in the kitchen helped her feel a sense of control. Preparing meals, using knowledge and creativity to make delicious meals, even if it was for a person she would rather not be waiting on.

Phyrra was cracking eggs when Alice saddled up beside her, trying to help with her bowl of cracked eggs, picking out shells as she went.

“You look like an old pro at this. I’m an absolute shite in the kitchen.”

“I was mostly the one that prepared meals for …” Phyrra halted, one day she would be able to voice his name without halting first. For now, the wounds were still fresh. “Anyways, perhaps I could give you some help with your cooking if you’d like.”

Alice agreed wholeheartedly, loving this easy friendship Phyrra provided. The elf girl handed Alice a large knife, asking her if she wanted to chop the vegetables. It was a sad sight, the medium stabbing ineffectively.

“Hold your finger’s like this, it will prevent you from cutting yourself, and slice like this. Yes, good job.” Alice didn’t feel demeaned at Phyrra’s calm instructions. The elf girl was classy, a kind of reserved shyness that Alice didn’t usually find appealing. Nevertheless, there was sweetness in Phyrra, Alice could overlook a little naivety.

Together, the ingredients were mixed. Alice was made aware of Hellboy’s eyes following Phyrra’s sure movements as she transferred the mixture into the sizzling pan.

So relaxed as she was in her routine, Phyrra gave a start at Trevor’s voice.

“Ah Phyrra, say good morning to Major Ben Daimo.” Phyrra turned to a tall, somber man entering. All Phyrra got was a slight nod before the cranky man reached the coffee pot, grunting his morning to his boss.

“Don’t worry about Ben. Takes the term ‘strong, silent type’ to new levels, he’ll come around to you.” She smiled at Alice’s attempt to make her feel better.

Phyrra added another plate, quickly whisking together another omelet. She asked Binx over to blow a heating enchantment to speed up the process.

Phyrra deposited the five creations onto their plates, she would share with Binx as always, the pixie couldn’t handle much to herself. As the group gathered around the counter,

“Have you given any thought to my offer Phyrra?”

She stopped reaching for her plate. Yes, she had, she hadn’t stopped thinking about it since he spoke the words into existence. Could she stay here, among these humans? Use her abilities for some good after so long being used. She looked to Binx, the pixie shook her head ruefully.

“You already know your answer. I’m not gonna change your mind.”

Phyrra gave her attention back to her new colleagues.

“You’ve all shown me the truest kindness I’ve experienced in who knows how long. My answer is yes, of course.”

Phyrra couldn’t help the tickled laughter at Alice’s yelled exclamation.

“Awesome! I can help train you, teach ya some moves. This is gonna be so cool! I’m not the only girl on the team anymore!”

“Hope you fit in well,” Phyrra was perplexed by Major Daimo’s mysterious answer, but didn’t give it much more thought. As Alice had said, she would simply have to be extra kind to the stoic man until he got used to her.

Phyrra’s mind halted. She was so foolish. That’s what she would have to do with Hellboy!

As this interaction was happening, Hellboy was silent. He was trying to digest the information. Phyrra on the team. Phyrra traveling with them, putting herself in dangerous situations they often found themselves in. Of course, on the one hand, he was filled with excitement at the idea of Phyrra being around daily.

The other hand couldn’t stop thinking about how delicate she seemed. Sure, she had the strength he knew. She was incredibly bright. Resourceful.

It didn’t stop him from worrying.

Praises all around were given to Phyrra on her food. She felt herself flushing under the attention. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy it. She had always had praise, but it was a double-edged sword. These people meant their compliments, didn’t expect anything in return.

Everyone was tucking in with enthusiasm to their breakfasts when Trevor cleared his throat.

“Now that you are all here. I must inform you you’ll be leaving today for the Galápagos Islands. There have been some sightings of lizard men off the coast of San Christobal, causing quite a nuisance to the tourists.”

“Phyrra, you’ll stay behind this time. While their gone, I will begin to teach you some finer points of this operation. Ms. Monaghan, when she returns, can give you some sparring help. I don’t wish to overwhelm you as we’re still researching your ancestry. Perhaps a couple of weeks, you would be set for fieldwork. We’ll play it by ear.”

Phyrra nodded her understanding. Of course, first and foremost in the mind was recovering her memories. As much as she had to square the debt with her saviors, she had self-preservation to think of. She contemplated this as without thinking about it she went to collect the plates.

“You put those down right now Ms. Phyrra. You cooked us this wonderful breakfast, we can clean up.” Trevor gentle command to Phyrra was heard and with Alice and Ben, they collected the plates, changing subjects as they bussed them to the sink. Hellboy wasn’t one for washing dishes, he always ended up breaking them.

The two left behind locked eyes.

“Would you like some more?” Phyrra came over to him with the coffee pot. A peace-offering.

“Yeah, please.” It had been a damn fine breakfast. The knowledge that Phyrra had talents in culinary as well as magic with her beauty stalled him. He would just have to take this elf girl in as he got to know her, now that she would be around more.

“Welcome to the team, I guess.” Phyrra’s lips stretched in a dazzling smile. Hellboy audibly swallowed but managed to return the favor with a slight smirk.

“Thank you, Hellboy.”

“..Never got my chance.”

“Excuse me?”

“Last night. I didn’t get a chance to return the thank you. I mean for… Fixing me up.”

Phyrra re-evaluated his entire behavior. She did flee immediately at his quietness. She had taken his odd behaviour for disinterest or unpleasantness. Hellboy seemed very shy. She didn’t want him to be nervous around her, she owed him everything. Phyrra had never experienced this feeling, she felt drawn to his creature. She wanted his good opinion more than anyone she had ever met before.

Not for the first time, she cursed her amnesia for the stolen moments between them.

She would have to be patient and get the answers out of him one day.

“You’re most welcome. I would have spent my whole life trapped if it wasn’t for you all.” Phyrra’s eyes flicked to Trevor and Alice discussing some kind of event coming up. Also to Ben, brooding over his cup of coffee. She returned to his eyes. They were quite lovely; blazing like sunsets.

“Let me do something for you. I should give you a favor.”

The elf girl chose that moment to lay her palm against the back of Hellboy’s stone hand resting on the counter. Phyrra found herself savoring the sensation. She expecting it to feel cool to the touch, but as his name suggests, a great warmth emanated from him at all times. The stone was no different.

Hellboy had hoped that if he ever came in physical contact with Phyrra again, it would have become familiar, not as much of a shock.

He’d never been more wrong. She wasn’t using her magic, but it felt as if her caress was lightening his hangover. He didn’t have much feeling in his right hand, that’s why it smashed things so well. He felt Phyrra’s touch. Once again, she had the coolest, tender way of placing her fingers against him. He looked down at the slight shift of her fingers running across the rock and shivered.

Trevor spoke up.

Both parties felt blank when the moment broke. Feelings too new to be recognized left an awkward pause...

“Well, I’d say you three better be heading off. The helicopter will be ready in ten.”

Alice could have killed the Professor. They were so cute. Alice couldn’t handle the way they looked at each other. She could think of a few favors Phyrra could give Hellboy… Okay maybe she wasn’t really paying attention to the Professor about the Alumni Banquet, but all the parties were the same after a while: catch a flute of champagne off a passing waiter, smiling pleasantly at a few decrepit billionaires, stay close to the Professor and thank him at the end of the night for being a fabulous date. Super boring. But a plan was brewing in Alice’s mind, Phyrra and Hellboy’s infatuation with each other at the forefront.

They were gonna name their first child after her.

“Be safe.” Were the words she spoke as she withdrew her hand. It was a simple request, but the idea of it unhinged him. Her wish for his safety. It gave him hope, that he didn’t completely fuck up this burgeoning friendship with the elf girl. As alluring as he found Phyrra, first he had to get her to like him.

“I will...See ya later,” Hellboy resisted the urge to run away. No longer would he run from Phyrra. That was the start, he found the strength to continue looking at her as they left, relishing in her luminous eyes, her graceful features. The first thing Hellboy had to do was get over just being around her. The only way to do that, he concluded, was to stop avoiding her like the plague. Treating her like the same, scared wild animal he met at Elias’s compound.

Phyrra was bereft as the trio disappeared out of the room. It was an odd response, it wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy just Trevor’s company, the calm sureness. She would miss them though: funny Alice, shy Hellboy and aloof Ben, quite a little band they made. Would she be able to fit among them?

“Phyrra, might I suggest we go into town today to get you some essentials? Clothes and such,”

She was confused by Trevor’s request.

“You are a company member now, and our salaries are generous.” She realized what he meant, chuckling as she accepted the outstretched arm with her hold, delighting at the older man’s generosity.

“I would like that very much, Trevor.”

San Christobal...two days later...

Ben had retired early, leaving HB and Alice sitting at the firepit. The tourists had been more than thankful for their quick dealings with the hombres lagarto, they had shown it by giving them baskets filled with booze and sweet fruits. A bottle of rum was passed between the comrades for awhile. Before Alice couldn’t help but bring up the dreaded subject.

“So...Phyrra.” Hellboy stiffened at the mention of her name.

“Want some tips?”

“Not in a million years,” Hellboy hated he was this obvious. He was so not used to this, this attraction he had for Phyrra. Sure, he was half-man. He found women attractive. in his youth he had posters of Brigitte Bardot and Jayne Mansfield pinned on his bedroom walls. They turned into Farrah Fawcett and Sharon Stone as the decades flew by.

Nimue had been the first woman to show interest in him, look how that turned out. She had used her wiles to try to force him into his destiny of the bringer of the apocalypse. Despite what his father had thought, he was stronger than any perfumed words or perky breasts, it had just felt... Nice. To have been desired for once, not treated like a freak.

No erection was worth the end of days.

That awful dream or vision he had when Alice picked him up after his giant encounter. Him in the shower. Nimue coming to him. Bathing in blood. It was some sick shit. At the moment, yes he had been carried away. He had wet dreams before, being a 60-year-old virgin would do that to you. He had assumed it was just one of those. Nimue was pure evil but she hadn’t been hard on the eyes.

Now with Phyrra, he felt so very different. She was pureness personified, a beacon of warmth, goodness. He had come to terms with knowing he wasn’t an evil creature, nurture over nature had made that clear. It didn’t mean he deserved something so innocent as Phyrra.

“Actually, not like that.” Hellboy pulled from the bottle, “But you’re a girl-”

“Thanks for noticing!” Alice jerked the bottle out of his hands, taking a drink herself.

“You know what I mean. How should I…. Aw geez, I don’t know…”

“Woo her? Sweep her off her feet? Get those eyelashes fluttering?” Alice, in her slight inebriated state,

Hellboy gave Alice a grave look.

“Okay, you know what, if you’re just gonna make fun of me, forget I said anything.” He started to lift himself off the rock.

“Don’t move HB, you know I’m kidding.” Alice regarded Hellboy “I’m just… Happy that you’ve found someone I guess... You deserve it.”

“Shucks, kid.” Hellboy grew silent, insecurities rising in him. “What if she-”

“Stop right there mister! Don’t forget already I’m a woman. I can take notice when I see two people attracted to each other. She doesn’t look at any of the other men at HQ the same way she looks at you, get my drift?”

“Alright, so what should I do?”

“She seems to be very old-fashioned. A proper lady, so you’re gonna have to be the proper gent. I’m sure she hasn’t ever had someone want to listen and do what she wants.” Alice smirked at her friend, "So sorry to say, you’re going to have to man up and ask her.”

Alice didn’t reveal her project, he was already very wary of asking this elf girl out, she couldn’t spook him too much. She held the bottle out.

Hellboy drank some more.

He could do it. He’s faced demi-gods and titans. He’s looked in the face of evil personified and cut it down with a swipe of a blade. He could ask Phyrra out on a date.

He hoped.

#fanfiction #hellboy fanfiction #hellboy 2019 #david harbour #writing #hellboy

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donnnoir · 5 years

Text

Abduct this dick; assholes

Dallas, Texas July 16, 2019

Well since I am known to be a bit of a killjoy; I reckon I should just go ahead and piss in everybody’s punch bowl right off the bat. If I was a prudent man I would wait to secure a large contingent of followers before unpacking certain ugly Truths. Excepting that a given percentile would drop because I essentially assaulted one of their tenants of faith. I however have never been known to be either a sensible nor prudent man. As the song says, “if the Truth hurts bear it”. Thus with that in mind let’s dance.

The phenomena known as Alien Abduction is for the most part (like 99.5 %) false. Now before everyone decides to block me, allow me to say that the individuals who are suffering and experiencing abduction are indeed being abducted. They are being experimented on by their abductors. The real question and therefore crux of the matter is, who is abducting these people? What is happening to them? For what purposes? Why are they experiencing these abductions as being perpetrated by aliens, principally the Greys? Why would not aliens be abducting humans?

From discussions long ago on the topic of Alien Abduction. I was generally informed that, “come on really”! Think about it, a more progressed race of intelligent beings can cross the entirety of the cosmos to come anal probe hill-billy Jeb to see what he has been eating? Really? Look long ago I saw all kinds of “spheres” and craft very similar to what we now call drones used by ETs to collect data or observe us. If they want information on ANYONE, including Hill-Billy Jeb. They could let Jeb inhale a micro sphere capable of scanning his entire body. Transmit the data to a command module or craft were a non-living version of Jeb could be assembled down to each atom in real time in a lab. This “version” could then be manipulated as necessary to whatever determining factors were being considered. This sphere could give continuous live real time data so the subject could be observed in real life context. Without any undo suffering or harm. Once sufficient data has been collected the sphere can simply exit Jeb’s body via the closest orifice. Hell the sphere wouldn’t even need to enter Jeb. I just put that in to illustrate the possibility to any who subscribe to such being necessary to collect data. Oh and I mean no offense to my Hill-Billy friends or kin.

Please always remember these persons the abductees are genuinely experiencing real and very disturbing memories of actually being kidnapped and tortured. Let us not add to their pain by trying to minimize their suffering so that what they are experiencing fits some little box in our minds. If anything the realities of what is happening should enrage everyone to the point of demanding that those responsible are held to the highest level of accountability and justice is done to them. Plain and simply put - beginning with Our Government the Alien Phenomena inclusive of Abductions has been usurped to serve the agendas of what can best currently be called The Shadow Government. Which is deeper and darker than what is presently being referred to as the Deep State (Government). During the ‘60’s NASA developed Holographic Technologies. These were initially employed along with hallucinatory drugs as part of a variety of cover stories for the victims of the infamous MK Ultra (mind control) experiments of the time. I suggest you YouTube Cathy O’Brien. She openly discusses the matter, or read “Trance-formation of America”, or her other books on the topic. The victims then suffered additional torture and trauma as these scenarios / cover stories were put in place among the victim’s memories. As the MK Ultra program was expanded to larger and larger portions of the population it became common practice to embed and use the Alien Abduction scenario in all test subjects. Matter of fact following the initial reports and the common use of hypnotic regression to recover these memories. In later sessions with these same individuals. They generally recalled seeing several of the notorious Men in Black also in the room during their torture (presumed science experimentation by the Greys). I suspect that the more recent reports no longer recall such. As programmers of this type are quick to adjust their activities to exclude any tell tale signs of “the man behind the current” as it were. The explosion of this supposed Phenomena follows closely the expansion of the continuing programs replacing MK Ultra within and throughout our society. Ultimately the interests of Our Shadow Government align with those of the Ruling Black Hand of other Shadow Governments around the world. As such we exported this “Phenomena” to the world.

Sadly not all abductions can be explained by my thesis. Mostly due to the fact not all ETs are benevolent, some even view us as a food source. Some are misidentified, when their old world label is much more appropriate that being “demons”. Don’t worry everyone is going to get reacquainted with these entities from dark lower harmonic realms and their hive mind sets. Much sooner than most of you may like. Believe me we are not ready for what is coming.

So what the fuck does it mean? The totality of the situation is beyond me! What I can tell you constitutes a small portion of what is happening and to a lesser degree what is planned for all of us, but most particularly the unfortunate abductees. First and foremost this project/operation was to cover up the sadistic practices of these occultic/satanic believers and their vile appetites. Nonetheless the presumed operational objectives were genetic sampling and experimentation of the victims. You see in Antediluvian times one of the great sins of the sons and daughters of Eve was altering their own genome or adulterating it with that of the Nephilim. By the time Noah came around the practice had become so wide spread that quite literally just Noah and his family had sufficient original genes from Adam and Eve to qualify as being appropriate to continue the human race. Important footnote here; as according to Antediluvian Law and Tradition, Noah would have brought his household with him on the Ark. Which is inclusive of more than just those consanguineously associated to him. Consequently these Occultist that make up the Shadow Government wanted to track down all the fragments of these abomination variants scattered in the genes of the population. They are currently active in trying to create Nephilim via cloning as an attempt to produce super soldiers for the Military Industrial Complex. With some degree of success I might add. If creating an abomination can be called a success at any level. While farming test subjects they also wished to test how flexible our genome really is. Years ago there was discussion as to the programable nature of our DNA. Comparing it to the Operating Systems of computers and how it could be used to transfer information along with how to make an executable file to update the base program. As part of this, experiments were devised and various “packets of code” were placed in the test subjects. At some future date the individual with be further victimized by being subjected to a stimuli (more than likely some form of non-ionizing radiation of a particular frequency and modulation) meant to cause the code to express its self in the subject. With unimaginable speed the person’s genome will rewrite its self and express this physically in and on the test subject. I suspect that depending on the amounts initially expressed and its penetration in our society many groups may have this delayed so as to see how it passes from one generation to another, allowing observation of any mutations and continuity. They wish to hopefully create whole new species of humans. Granted the attrition rate will be immense, but hey “you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet”. At least that is what they would have you believe. There are other tie-ins, considerations and vectors from other platforms that are worth thinking about as part of this. Speculation into the topic could fill pages, and no doubt does in various operation manuals elsewhere. But I need to be as succinct as possible and maintain focus for any reader who happens upon my writings. Good Luck to Us All; G-dspeed and may He have mercy on Us all; cause it is going to be a wild ride...

#alien abduction #extra terra 👽#conspiracytheorist #greys #ET #history #religion #shadow government #cloning #science #DNA #nephilim #ocultist #satanist #mk ultra #mind control #nasa #antediluvian #the dark one

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kianraidelcam · 5 years

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Written for @whumptopia‘s 30 Day RoboWhump Challenge! Thanks to @anonymous-idfk for the idea behind today’s prompt, “Glitching.” Full fic under the cut!

The first incident lasts 15 seconds.

Connor had been coaching Markus through negotiation tactics in light of their recent invitation to Washington D.C. when he freezes mid-sentence. His LED turns a solid crimson with no warning, his fingers tapping against his legs with no rhythm or purpose. His mouth slightly open and gaze blank, the RK800 suddenly becomes unresponsive to the world around him.

He doesn’t hear Markus calling his name.

He doesn’t feel Markus’ hand on his shoulder.

He doesn’t notice when Markus tries to interface with him, only to be met with an error message.

He only notices that Markus is suddenly very close to him with a pressure on his shoulder, and the sentence he was continuing trails off, blinking once at the sudden change. “Markus?”

“Connor, are you okay,” the deviant leader's face is awash with concern that wasn't there a moment ago.

He's shaking his head, because of course he is, why wouldn't he be? He voices as much, and the concern transforms to disbelief, eyebrows furrowing. A quick scan tells Connor that Markus’ stress levels have jumped by 5% at his words, bringing it to a solid 20%. The RK200 was the leader of an entire, new intelligent species, navigating in a world where there was no solid precedent for their situation. His stress levels constantly fluctuated between 20% and 30% as a result. However, this week had been calm, and a sudden jump was near inexplicable. Had he received a message that Connor hadn’t? Had a glitch in Markus’ systems occurred?

“You were completely unresponsive for 15 seconds, Connor. Your LED was red and I couldn't connect with you.”

It's Connor's turn to be filled with disbelief. That wasn't right, all of his systems were nominal and his self-diagnostic last night proved it. Then again, he couldn't recall when Markus had gotten so close. He glances at the hand on his shoulder, which the older android suddenly pulls off, almost self-consciously.

He blinks as he runs another diagnostic and checks his internal clock, reading through the results. Everything came back normal, just as it had last night, but his internal clock confirms Markus’ claim. “I...was offline for 15 seconds?”

Markus nods slowly with a tilt to his head and he reaches out a hand questioningly, the skin retracting from his palm. Connor only hesitates for a fraction of a second before reaching his own hand out, accepting the connection request.

{CONNECTION ESTABLISHED: RK200 - Markus}

{RK200: I’m just going to look through your memories and run a diagnostic, is that okay?}

{RK800: That’s okay.}

{MEMORY LOGS ACCESSED: 180239 12:45:09pm - PERMISSION GRANTED RK200}

A memory flashes across his vision; a conversation they had just minutes ago replaying in his mind. They’re talking about different senators and possible ways to sway them to the deviants’ cause when the glitch occurs. Static creeps into Connor’s vision at 12:45:14pm before cutting to black completely.

{RK200: Did you notice the static distorting your vision?}

{RK800: I don’t remember seeing any. I don’t remember any part of the interruption. In my mind, I never stopped talking to you.}

{MEMORY LOGS ACCESSED 180239 12:45:14pm - PERMISSION GRANTED RK200}

{ERROR: MEMORY LOGS NOT FOUND - WOULD YOU LIKE TO TRY AGAIN (y/n)?}

{y - USER RK200}

{ERROR: MEMORY LOGS NOT FOUND}

{NEXT AVAILABLE MEMORY LOG: 180239 12:45:29pm}

{MEMORY LOGS ACCESSED: 180239 12:45:29pm - PERMISSION GRANTED RK200}

Connor watches as he continues his sentence where he left off, the sudden closeness of Markus jarring him and the surprise echoes second hand across their connection, as does Markus’ own surprise. He hears himself say Markus’ name and the memory abruptly falls away

{RK200: I’m going to run a diagnostic now.}

He sends a faint acknowledgement across the interface, watching as the diagnostic scrolls across his HUD.

{DIAGNOSTIC COMMENCING - PERMISSION GRANTED RK200}

{CHECKING BIOCOMPONENTS: OK}

{CHECKING BIOSENSORS: OK}

{CHECKING OS: OK}

{CHECKING AI ENGINE: OK}

{NO ABNORMALITIES DETECTED}

{ALL SYSTEMS OPERATIONAL}

{RK200: Whatever it was, everything seems fine now. With your permission, I’d like to try one more thing.}

{RK800: What did you want to see?}

{RK200: I wanted to run through your memory logs and see if you have any other missing memory files. I promise I won’t look at anything you don’t want me to see but I need to know if this has happened before, and if so, if it is a common occurrence.}

Connor squeezes his eyes shut. Time and time again, he has had his memory looked through and analyzed by CyberLife and technicians, and never with his permission. As a machine, he didn’t care - no, wait. That was a lie. Every single time cold, gloved hands touched his LED and snaked a cable to his neck, every time Amanda watched his memories before his reports, he felt a spark of something shine through the cold apathy of his obedience. Before, he registered it as a fault in his code, as a software instability that had to be torn down and fixed. Now, he knew the proper name for it; dread.

{RK200: Connor, you know I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t feel like it was important.}

He could say no. He was allowed that now. But the logical part of his mind reasoned that everything Markus was saying was true. He needed to know if this has happened before and if it would happen again. In his line of work, one such episode could mean the difference between life or death, and not just for him. Lieutenant Anderson could pay the price if he slipped, as could Markus or North or Simon or Josh.

Besides, Markus is his friend. He’d never hurt him and he wouldn’t be searching through his memories with a judgmental eye; he’d be searching for missing files and nothing more.

Connor takes an unnecessary breath before answering, grateful for Markus’ quiet patience as he waits for the younger RK model’s answer.

{RK800: Go ahead.}

{MEMORY LOGS SEARCH - PERMISSION GRANTED RK200}

{SEARCH: MISSING MEMORY FILES FOLLOWING 111138}

{SEARCHING…}

{23 RESULTS FOUND}

If he was human, his heart would have skipped a beat. There had been 23 occasions where he has been completely unresponsive, lost in an ‘episode’ that he had no idea existed. He pulls his hand away from Markus’ warm grasp, schooling his features into neutrality when he notices the man watching him with an analytical eye. No doubt the RK200 was watching him for any signs of stress while looking for an explanation. “I’m okay, Markus.”

A hint of a fond smile graces Markus’ lips as he crosses his arms, “That’s what you said the last time you had a glitch. The next thing I knew, you were being dragged into New Jericho’s medical bay by one very upset Lieutenant Anderson.”

Connor’s tense posture relaxes at Markus’ teasing words even as his social integration protocols kick in.

{DEFLECTING JOKE: Meant to relax subject and distract them from an item or topic of concern. Commonly used by doctors, nurses, therapists and other members of mental/physical healthcare}

He dismisses the notification, not bothering to read it fully. “Hank may have overreacted. It was a minor glitch at most.”

Markus’ answer is deadpan, although the amused glint in his eyes is anything but serious, “We had to replace your thirium pump regulator because your systems decided it was incompatible,” he sighs, looking down while rubbing the back of his head before looking back up to meet Connor’s eyes, “Let me take you home at the very least. I’ll tell Hank what’s going on so he can watch you until Simon and Josh come back from Vancouver tonight. Then, they can search through your coding more thoroughly than I can and fix whatever’s wrong.”

Connor opens his mouth to protest, that he can take care of himself when Markus raises a hand, silencing him before he can speak. “It’ll put my mind at ease. Consider it a favor.”

That asshole. He resists the urge to roll his eyes at Markus’ obvious plea to Connor’s conscious and instead acquiesces, falling into easy conversation with the man as Markus leads them out the door toward New Jericho’s entrance, cybernetically hailing a taxi as they do so.

Thirty minutes later, they find themselves outside the Lieutenant’s door as a gentle snow begins to fall, blanketing the world in a peaceful silence, despite the blaring music of Knights of the Black Death audible from behind the closed door. Markus raises an eyebrow at Connor, to which he shrugs before grabbing the doorknob, “You might want to turn down your audio sensitivity. The Lieutenant is not one for classical music.”

Markus chuckles, “Why am I not surprised?”

Connor turns the doorknob to be greeted by the sight of one Hank Anderson cursing as he rearranges the furniture, sweat dripping from his brown. The RK800 crosses his arms as he takes in the changes Hank made to the living room, connecting with the speakers to turn them down to a more reasonable level. This earns another curse from the man as he glances to the entryway. “Fucking hell, Connor. How many times have I told you not to hack my wiretaps?”

Connor frowns at the expression, “I can assure you, Lieutenant, that your bluetooth devices are not wiretaps-”

“Millennial humor, google it. Hey Markus.”

“Hello Lieutenant Ander-”

“Hank. Bad enough that Connor calls me ‘Lieutenant’ all the time,” Hank wipes the sweat from his eyes before gesturing to the newly arranged furniture, “What do y’all think?”

Connor releases a sly smile before looking around the living room, accessing his databanks as he does so, “I believe this arrangement will have a rather...negative effect on your mental health. Studies have shown that facing your furniture toward the doorway will help you to feel calmer and more relaxed by providing with a constant vi-”

Hank groans, “Oh what, now you’re an interior decorator, is that it?”

“Perhaps if you would stop interrupting us, I’d tell you.”

“Asshole,” Hank mutters as Markus chuckles again at the banter between the two, drawing the detective’s attention, “So what do I owe the pleasure, Mr. President of the Androids?”

Markus ignores the nickname, patting Sumo on the head as he lumbers toward Connor. “I just wanted to let you know that something happened to Connor at New Jericho.”

Hank’s face immediately grows suspicious, and he glances at at the android in question who is reaching down to pet Sumo, freezing at Markus’ words. “The fuck you mean, something happened?”

“He seems fine now, but he just...froze in the middle of our conversation. Became completely unresponsive. It only lasted 15 seconds and then he started again like he never stopped. He didn’t even know it happened.”

“It sounds like something that used to happen to my friend when she was a kid. ‘Absence seizures’ or something like that,” Hank’s gaze is thoughtful until he hears Sumo whining and he returns his attention to Connor, who hasn’t moved, except to tap his fingers against his leg.

“I looked through Connor’s memory files and found 23 missing files, all lasting anywhere between 10 seconds to a minute,” Markus follows Hank’s gaze, trailing off as he does so.

“Connor?” Hank’s voice is concerned, the gruffness that previously dominated his tone gone. Connor doesn’t acknowledge Hank or the whining Saint Bernard nuzzling his hip, LED glowing a harsh red against his temple, “Con, can you hear me?”

At the lack of response from the android, Markus walks forward, the skin from his hand already gone as he tries to connect with the catatonic android. He frowns as he receives an error message preventing him from connecting. “It’s like he’s not even there…,” he murmurs softly, “We should wait it out. These don’t seem to last long, and I already notified Simon and Josh. They’ll arrive later tonight and will be able to do a more thorough examination than I can.”

So they wait as 15 seconds becomes thirty. Thirty seconds turn into a minute and Markus can feel the beginnings of worry crawling its way into his stomach. After a minute and a half, Connor’s eyes start blinking rapidly in pace with his spinning LED and Markus attempts to interface again. “I thought you said these don’t fucking last long, Markus.”

“All the incidents I could find only lasted a few seconds...he should already be out of it. Here, help me move him to the couch, I don’t want him accidentally falling over.”

{CONNECTION ESTABLISHED: PL600 - Simon}

{PL600: Markus? Is everything okay?}

Markus attempts to lift Connor off the ground, only to be met with stiff, uncooperative limbs. After some manipulating, he and Hank manage to lift the RK800 and lay him down on the couch.

{RK200: It’s Connor. He’s frozen and I can’t connect with him. It’s the second time this has happened today.}

{PL600: Are his fingers tapping?}

{RK200: Yes, how did you know?}

{PL600: We’ve seen this in a few prototypes, they have lines of unfinished code that causes them to freeze whenever they run into it. How long has he been unresponsive?}

{RK800: Five minutes. It doesn’t show any signs of stopping.}

{PL600: Let me know if it passes 15 minutes. At that point, you’d have to force a hard reboot to bring him back. Josh is searching for an earlier flight back to Detroit.}

Markus pulls his hand from Connor’s shoulder and rests it on his head instead, sliding down to sit in front of the couch. Hank goes to the hallway and returns with a blanket, which he uses to tuck the android in, bringing a soft smile to Markus’ face despite the situation.

{PL600: Don’t worry, Markus. It’s an easy fix. I’ll bring the equipment from New Jericho so he can be at home when it happens.}

{RK200: Thank you, Simon.}

{CONNECTION ENDED}

“Simon tells me it should be an easy fix. He and Josh are trying to catch an earlier flight to Detroit,” Markus informs the Lieutenant.

Hank grunts in response before tucking the stray fringe of hair behind Connor’s ear, “Damn kid is the nicest fucking person. Not fair that he has to go through so much shit.”

“I share the same sentiment, Hank,” Markus checks his internal clock and sighs as it ticks ever closes toward 15 minutes, “If this goes on for any longer, I’m going to have to force a hard reboot. He would hate that.”

“You’re gonna have to explain that one to me,” Hank’s voice is tired as he settles into the recliner, keeping a watchful eye over the android.

“It’s like waking a human up from anesthesia, except Connor has a bad reaction to it. He’ll process things slower and several programs will be turned off during the reboot. It almost always causes a panic attack in him,” Markus pauses as the tapping stops suddenly and Connor’s arm reaches out.

He watches as the android frowns in confusion, his LED switching to a distressed yellow before sighing. “It happened again.”

It’s not a question. Markus feels his heart clench at the frustration evident in Connor’s voice and he stands up to give him some space. Connor doesn’t rise from his prone position on the couch, although he does look at Hank when he observes the blanket wrapped around him, “I’m sorry, Hank.”

Hank takes a deep breath through his nose, “Nothing to apologize for, kid. Ain’t your fault. Blame the pricks at CyberLife for not bothering to finish your code.”

“My code?” Connor looks to Markus for an explanation even as the deviant leader sends an update to Josh and Simon.

“I talked to Simon. He said it’s a problem it prototypes caused by an unfinished code somewhere in your software. He and Josh will be here tonight with the tools to fix it.”

Connor pulls an arm from under the blanket to pat against his chest. Sumo needs no further invitation before jumping on top of the RK800, nearly burying him in a mass of fur. Markus supposes if he was human, he would have to worry about Connor suffocating. Instead, he smiles at the glimpse into Connor’s life, grateful for the rare peek. “Thank you, Markus,” his voice is somewhat muffled by the giant dog, but the appreciation is clear, as is the hint of embarrassment.

“Don’t worry about it, Connor. Let’s call it a thanks for everything you’ve done for us.”

Hank reaches for the remote, turning on the TV, “Shit happens, son. Try not to worry about it until Simon and Josh get here. You got any suggestions on what to watch?”

Markus smiles as Connor’s LED switches to a calm blue as he connects with the television, the show switching from the news to an aquatic documentary. He cybernetically cancels his remaining appointments for the day and settles by Connor’s feet, settling in as Hank tosses a thirium pouch at him.

Connor would be alright. He always was.

#dbh #detroit become human #dbh fanfic #dbh fanfiction #fanfiction #my writing #30 day robowhump challenge #connor rk800 #connor #dbh markus #markus manfred #markus #hank anderson #what is a markus and how do I write one #glitching #whumptopia #anonymous-idfk #connor whump

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tkcooptech · 6 years

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Open source scifi universe

I’m working on a side thing for my makerplex project. It’s a bit long but you might find it interesting. The lore/timeline will be after the cut The concept is to create a shared open source universe between my pre-existing stories. This will allow anyone to use any of the assets or elements created for this universe for their own purpose. First we will make a pen/paper style RPG for each “Age” as a module, including rules, what tech is available, what it can/can’t do, and how to either create/use a pre-existing setting to make your own campaign. As people create/share assets we would be able to expand to other forms of entertainment. Any income earned by the entertainment aspect of the Makerplex (through this open source universe) will be funneled directly towards the STEAM scouts themselves. Age 1 (1950s-2010s) "We are not alone" Age 2 (Project Recovery and the beginning of the Arcologies) "Forged from fire and flesh" Age 3 (3-4 thousand years) "The evolving sleep" Age 4 (1-50 years post wake up) "The hungering void" Age 5 (unknown) "Infinite worlds" The whole point to having this story setup is that with each module we release to this ever expanding universe it would be in step with our Makerplex's development. With us able to go from simply publishing the rules/stories online for free with nice physical copies to sell, to eventually making the lasertag game, expand from there to make video games/cartoons/and other entertainment using the assets created along the way. Students designing weapons for the lasertag in 3D modeling could print it out for their lasertag weapon, but could then use that same file asset for a CGI character to carry around, same with armor/other gear. Kids would be adding to the lore with their custom gear. Same with other people who could play around with this universe. If they want their stories to be considered official canon in our collected universe they would have to make anything in their story open source as well.So let's say a group of oddballs, let's use a made up name... The Mclor..ish brothers decide to do a podcast for their game of the tabletop rpg version, it gets popular and they want it canon. We would be like, "Yes but it means that now other people can include a drawing of Magnis (totally different from Magnus) in their comic book if they want."

The general time line is that in this earth branches from us starting around 1890s the timeline of Earth diverges with the creation of a secret organization called "Switchboard", an organization whose main goal is to spread technology/knowledge to the people who need it. Things like advanced generators to run small villages, the formula for creating privately owned medicine patents along with the equipment to make it. Think like a reverse Brotherhood of steel.They operate out of secret areas built into various phone companies and utilize an early version of a computer to send packets of data and are able to essentially send blueprints/files to eachother through the telephone cables. (Obviously the limitations of the tech of the time meant they had to build permanent rooms in the phone companies switchboard buildings.)This is also why their founding members are mostly women due to hiring practices of the time. The invasion of the Br'Eetish along with Betty inventing the "superfactory" leads to a huge shift in humanity. Each nation in an arms race to fend of alien attacks. Humanity wins mostly due to MechaBetty, resulting in humanity being welcomed into a federation like group. Their prime directive however is much stricter, not allowing any technology to be shared with Earth from their neighbors, resulting in humanity reverse engineering the damaged remains of the Br'Eetish technology which itself is only a bit more advanced than modern day (due to the fact they are an uplifted species used as war dogs from a greedy corporate like interstellar empire called the Conglomerate) So humanity now knows about all of these different races in space but no real way to get beyond the moon even with the boost. The actual interstellar drive (on loan from the conglomerate in an planetary economic shattering interest rate) part of Br'Eetish mothership was lost to the void of space in an accident before it could be salvaged/reverse engineered.(edited) Cut to 50+ years later and humanity is still mostly fragmented, but after the invasion no major conflicts take place. During this time an organization grows from the old Switchboard and is focused on figuring out how to get beyond our solarsystem. This organization starts "Project Recovery" where they are attempting to use the latest technology including the "Microfactory" the more advanced version of the superfactory to be able to terraform or at least build habitable ships/living spaces out of desolate rocks.(edited)During this an embryonic version of the planet consuming species that founded the conglomarate hits earth. It is a fungi like hive mind, its instincts are to infect all living things, consume them, have all of the infected beings then start consuming eachother, using their brains as organic computers to self edit their genetics with the genetics of the things they eat. Essentially it does "survival of the fittest" with itself until it ends up with a library of genetic traits/combos to choose from and also a giant kaiju like monstrosity until it becomes too big to move no matter what it does to change itself. It then explodes sending out armored copies of itself out into space, now armed with the traits of the previous world it infected to repeat the process but faster/better. Humanity barely survives this, and copies the Arcology like setup of "Recovery" the island that mounted the main defense against this onslaught.But the war ends up ravaging the earth, many species got wiped out by the infected consuming them, nuclear reactors go critical and leave fallout due to no one manning them for years, frantic countries that used WMDs as last ditch efforts to fight off infected or their larger kaiju like amalgamations.So this results in them developing transhumanist technologies, in part to be able to have android bodies remotely piloted by humans with cybernetic implants operating from the safety of the arcologies. Eventually we learn how to store our consciousness in specialized systems. The most secure sections of each arcology are turned into storage centers, and as much of the systems are made automated as possible. The rest of the arcologies are run by AI that will build/expand these structures as well as replenish the earth through passive terraforming tech, robotic "gardeners of eden", and cloning species that were wiped out and re-introducing them into areas cleaned up.This leads to several thousand years of the majority of humanity being stored. They would be selected to be put into bodies either human/robotic/genetically altered or a mix of the three during emergencies during this time. Because of how the systems work (such as the arcologies needing to keep a living population of different species going as well as samples of everyone's genetic info for remaking their bodies) they cannot afford to have any arcology go offline completely.(This time period is where people will have the most fun playing around with, for instance the laser tag game takes place in an arcology where part of the arcology ai broke off and got corrupted, taking over and destroying the arcology, almost like cancer in the body, multiplying/destroying. (Players design lasertag equipment that fits the setting to use) After the time skip with all of these arcologies causing humanity to develop radically different from place to place with the various things done to keep their arcologies going in different kinds of disasters it's almost like humanity is made up of multiple species, mixed with standard human civilians. This results in a golden age for Earth as now the planet is not only fully recovered but something entirely new.During this time the various interstellar organizations rose, fell, had wars, and changed completely. Earth joins in soon, our united transhuman collective quickly advances and is able to go beyond earth.Unfortunately the instability of the various galactic governance led to advanced tech just floating around in giant ship graveyards. Resulting in a technology infused version of the being that attacked earth when one crashes through such a graveyard. Because of its increased intelligence it is highly logical, and decides to head towards the super massive blackhole at the center of the galaxy, consuming anything it requires to expand its intelligence along the way. It sees the black hole as an endless source of power but doesn't know how to tap into it. It begins creating a fleet of massive supercomputers meant to calculate how to tap into that power source, and creates various fleets of attack/mining ships to consume entire worlds of materials to feed this expanding armada heading towards the center of the galaxy.

#open source #scifi

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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STARTUPS AND TEST

You just have to do something grand or heroic about starting a startup generally. Most technologies evolve a good deal of that spirit is, fortunately, preserved in macros. Not likely. Things. Well, obviously overtly sexy applications like stealth planes or special effects software would be interesting to start viewing startup ideas this way, because now that there are a couple catches.1 Users don't know what we're going to do.2 The nature of the business means that you have to consciously force yourself to keep looking. The techniques for dealing with detail. There's no controversy about which idea is most controversial: the suggestion that variation in wealth was in itself a good thing: if your society has no variation in productivity increases with technology, then the contribution of the most admired Web 2. So I recommend being good.3

To change the interface both have to agree to change it at once. Ideally, you are getting together with a lot of I/O. More diffident founders ask Will you try our beta?4 I'm not sure why, but it seems very unlikely.5 For example, we seem to have been the most common types of fluff links are banned as off-topic. Either it's something they felt they had to make concessions. You want them to feel this way about the software they're writing for you. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that lawyers at some point.6 So long as you're not being paid to. I'll tell you why.7 Which puts us in a weird situation: we don't know who our heroes should be. If wealth means what people want.

When you only have a small number of early adopters. So a town that has attractions other than the university. There's no controversy about which idea is most controversial: the suggestion that variation in wealth. If you want a recipe for a startup to do this by counting the occurrences of tokens in the nonspam corpus double.8 Nothing will teach you about angel investing like experience. No web startup does. If you want to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds. Decreasing economic inequality means eliminating startups.9 There are two main kinds of badness in comments: meanness and stupidity. Ditto for investors. Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a cozy, tenured research job.

If the spammers are careful about the headers and use a fresh url, there is not a zero sum game.10 As well as avoiding bullshit one should actively seek out things that matter. It's a lot more highly of Lisp if Common Lisp had powerful string libraries and can talk to the operating system. Why work on problems few care much about and no one will pay for.11 There is a kind of shorthand: money is a way of saving you work, not something you work despite. So although there may be, in certain specific moments like your family, this month a fixed amount of wealth in the world. The variation between programmers. Which is not to save them from being disappointed when things fall through.

So governments that forbid you to accumulate wealth are in effect decreeing that you work slowly.12 And during the Renaissance, journeymen from northern Europe were often employed to do the most disgusting sort of work, like spamming, or starting a company whose only purpose is patent litigation. But they are relentlessly resourceful. There is a surprising lack of correlation between how hot a deal a startup is, economically: a way of telling you what to do if you're not a hacker, you can't start a startup by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to the founders of the next Google. You have to be just a model; you can refine it into the finished product.13 Airbnb is a classic example of the dangers of deciding what programmers are allowed to want.14 You have to go out of business.15 The only way a startup can have any leverage in a deal is genuinely not to need it. Could a language with Lisp's syntax, or more precisely, preorders has helped a lot. Organic growth seems to yield better technology and richer founders than the big bang method.16 Forty-two years later, Kleiner Perkins funded Google, and the study he quoted was published in 1968. So the test of mattering to hackers.17

5% of the company if he'd let us have it. It's the junk food of experience.18 A is unheard-of.19 You have to be optimistic about what you can see people doing.20 He returned to Harvard for the fall semester after starting Microsoft. If you plan to get rich, how would you do it? The cartoon strip Dilbert has a lot to say about programming languages. But people don't.

All the great hackers I know despise them. It has sometimes been said that Lisp should use first and rest instead of car and cdr often are, in successive lines. Bigger companies solve the problem by partitioning the company.21 To be attractive to hackers, and learning what they want. Why does this happen? They'll like you even better when you improve your system, even if it is harder to get from zero to twenty than from twenty to a thousand. You could make a great city anywhere, if you want to stop too, because doing deals is a pain in the ass.22 Imagine if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing in spam-of-the-envelope calculations, this one wasn't designed for the world we now live in.23 Ditto for many other kinds of companies that don't make anything out of silicon, there always seem to be about technology. Any startup that could be described as a pie. In fact, this is the reason that high-tech startup is almost redundant. Consulting is the canonical example of work that doesn't scale.

You could have both now. I look them straight in the eye and say I'm designing a new kind of store. You don't want small in the sense that the measure of good design together, but within each individual project, one person has to be pierced too. But you can run into a Big Cheese I knew from the old days in the Yahoo cafeteria a few months later will depend more on energy and imagination than any kind of special training. If there were a word that meant the opposite of hapless, that would be enough to get the effect of such external factors on the popularity of a programming language is not the main reason Lisp isn't currently popular. You can stick instances of good design can be derived, and around which most design issues center. If you can't find an exact match for a token, treat it as if it were hard to reproduce in other countries, because you couldn't reproduce it in most of our lives when the days go by in a blur, and almost none for talking to the operating system.24 Things are different now, of course.25 When we talk to founders about good and bad investors, one of the most famous scientists seem to have made that deal, though perhaps none of them had never seen the Web before we came to tell them why they should be on it. It's just a more extreme variant where you don't just use your software, but individual hackers won't, and it's the hackers you need to figure it out. 5% of the company.26 But by no means impossible.

Notes

While environmental costs should be taken into account, they have less room to avoid companies that we wrote in verse. I know, Lisp code. This seems unlikely that religion will be a hot deal, I advised avoiding Javascript.

So if you're measuring usage you need a higher growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a discovery.

A lot of legal business. Whereas the activation energy required to notice when it's aligned with some axe the audience already has to be limits on the basis of intelligence. The unintended consequence is that the web. Earlier he'd had in grad school you always feel you should always absolutely refuse to give up more than the don't-be startup founders is how much effort on sales.

After a bruising fight he escaped with a product of some brilliant initial idea. The lowest point occurred when marginal income tax rates were highest: 14. Who knew how much harder it is very polite and b I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to solve problems, but more often than not what it would take forever to raise a series. But the time it would literally take forever in the other seed firms always find is that they take away with the VC declines to participate in the US News list is meaningful is precisely my point.

Looking at the time it takes more than just reconstructing word boundaries; spammers both add xHot nPorn cSite and omit P rn letters. So whatever market you're in the case. I'm guessing the next uptick after that, in one of them is that the only one restaurant left on the firm's site, June 2004: While the space of careers does.

He couldn't even afford a monitor.

When you had in school, and only incidentally to tell VCs early on? But Goldin and Margo think market forces in the U.

They live in a large pizza and found an open booth. There are some whose definition of property. They did try to ensure none of your last funding round. In practice formal logic is not entirely a coincidence, because the publishers exert so much that they're all that value, don't even try.

If he's bad at it he'll work very hard to think about, just as Europeans finished assimilating classical science. To use this technique, you'll usually do best to err on the partner you talk to an adult. So how do you know the answer is no personnel department, and know the actual server in order to make money off their median investments. Corollary: Avoid starting a startup was a new airport.

Emmett Shear, and then a block or so you can stick even more vice versa: the process of selling things to be low. The aim of such regulations is to be free to work with the money they receive represents wealth—that economic inequality is really about poverty.

Adam Smith Wealth of Nations, v: i mentions several that tried to raise money succeeded, and it has about the other.

And for those founders. One great advantage of startups have over established companies can't compete on price, and philosophy the imprecise half.

That's probably too much to generalize.

The root of the marks of a social network for pet owners is a sufficiently identifiable style, you can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than to call all our lies lies. If I paint someone's house, the bad VCs fail to mention a few actual winners emerge with hyperlinear certainty. You've gone from guest to servant.

But there's a continuum here. According to the problem is that Steve Wozniak in Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work. He, like speculators, that is a trailing indicator in any era if people are trying to make more money.

One father told me: Another approach would be very promising, because what they're getting, so I called to check and in a bug. But in this new world.

Any plan in 2001, but this could be overcome by changing the shape of the 70s never drew this curve.

If that were the people worth impressing already judge you more inequality. Which is why hackers give you more than clumsy efforts to manipulate them. The rest exist to this day, thirty years later. If you want to be evidence of a place to exchange views.

Perhaps this is a cause for optimism: American graduates have more money was the ads they show first. We once put up posters around Harvard saying Did you just get kicked out for here, since 95% of the false positives out of school. Comments at the mercy of circumstances: court decisions striking down state anti-dilution, which was open to newcomers because it is to raise money.

A larger set of good startups that are up-front capital intensive to founders. It would be reluctant to start with consumer electronics and to a VC who read it ever wished it longer. It's sometimes argued that we should, because outsourcing it will seem dumb in 100 years ago.

To help clarify the matter, get rid of everyone else and put our worker on a saturday, he took another year off and went to get going, and astronomy. Steven Hauser.

For example, would be to say for sure whether, e. In practice it's more like determination is proportionate to wd m-k w-d n, where you currently are. By Paleolithic standards, technology evolved at a middle ground. We see incumbents suppressing competitors via regulations or patent suits, we love big juicy lumbar disc herniations, but bickering at several hundred dollars an hour most people are immune to the minimum you need to circle back with a clear plan for the reader: rephrase that thought to please the same price as the first question is to carry a beeper?

I was a special recipient of favour, being a doctor. When investors can't make up the same way a bibilical literalist is committed to believing anything in particular took bribery to the ideal of a liberal education than past generations have.

Which helps explain why there are not written by the regular news reporters. He devoted much of the things we focus on growth instead of bookmarking.

You can retroactively describe any made-up idea as an adult. They're still deciding, which made it possible to transmute lead into gold though not economically at current energy prices, but suburbs are so intellectually dishonest in that respect. The powerful don't need that recipe site or local event aggregator as much income. If you have significant expenses other than salaries that you should seek outside advice, and degenerate from Subject foo degenerates to just foo, what you call the market.

The few people who chose the wrong side of making a good way to make peace. Which means one of them. Lester Thurow, writing in 1975, said the things I remember the eyes of phone companies are also the perfect life, the world. Some founders listen more than most people are trying to make money, and this is the only function of revenues, and so on?

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dee-the-red-witch · 6 years

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Oh here! Have a gigantic chunk of worldbuilding in one go!

Because when your RPG setting is specialized enough, it’s gonna need explanation, and you have to put chunks of that SOMEWHERE....

Thousand of years ago, the Thousand and One Gods created this world and filled it with all manner of things- Mountains, oceans, birds, animals, fish, The Ring, all of it. And they spread out among their own creations lived among them, and we think, were mostly happy with it. After a time, some gods, came together though, and decided they wanted to do more, and worked together to create races with intelligence. Beings that might someday be their own equals in some senses. How little they knew of just what kind of mistakes they were making.

First came the Elves. Eldest of the races, they were created as caretakers of the land and everything in it, feeling a close bond to the natural world. And after only a few generations, the gods saw that they were good. So good, that some of the Thousand and One wanted to reward them for their good works. Thus, the elves became the only race the gods gave the choice to of one of the rarest things they held back in their creations- immortality. Longevity in a fleshly body came at a price, though- and the Elves had to choose. The ability to live forever, or the close kinship to the land that they already possessed. The elves themselves could not make the choice unanimously, and so the race became split. Those who chose immortality became the High Elves, aloof scholars, and thinkers freed of their connection to the Earth, living lives that have no end except in violence or accident. Their long lives also came at a further cost that none had realized at the time- their own fertility, much less desire to produce offspring became greatly lessened with the transition, and while the High Elves may indeed outlast us all, they are always doomed to be a small population at best. The remaining elves who did not accept the gift, formed their own communities away from the High Elves, often taking their name from the types of land they dwelt in, such as the numerous populations of Wild Elves in today’s society. In the intervening time, others of the gods noticed that some of their creations were… well, to put it mildly, eating and killing far too many of their weaker creatures. Especially the Dragons, among others. And while the Elves were great caretakers, they needed something strong, daring, clever, and honorable enough to help them hunt down and keep certain of the populations in balance before the entire world was overrun. Thus, the Orcs were created. Strong in body and purpose, driven by strong senses of honor and nobility, they helped the Gods turn back the burgeoning hordes of Dragons and other monstrosities. Unburdened with the choice the elves made, the orcs also grew numerous, splitting into tribes and while their fierce nature may have led to some rather competitive inter-tribal struggles, they too lived mostly at peace with the land and the other races. With the land itself cared for by the Elves, and the creatures upon it by the Orcs, Some of the Thousand and One decided to create a race that would care for the things under the earth. A race dedicated to finding the riches they had put into the ground and putting them to use. And so, the subterranean Dwarves were made. Worked to nurture the deep caverns, mines, and mountains of the world. And the world remained in balance and spun on. But some of the Thousand and One felt they still had not done enough. Out of all the races, not one was possessed with the pure drive to create that the gods themselves had. And so… they made humans. Driven with ambition and passion their short but fertile lives should help push them forwards to reach new heights of creation, and bring forth all manner of new wonders upon the world.

Or so they thought. Where the other races lived in harmony with existence, humanity spread like the tides themselves, rapidly building and breeding until they became one of the most numerous species on the planet. Their discoveries of crafting and smithing and alchemy, and ultimately magic, have led to some of the greatest problems and advances the world has ever faced. About two thousand years ago by most histories’ reckoning, a human sorcerer whose name has since been lost to time and destruction, killed one of the gods and consumed their power, becoming the first of what would be known as the Great Sorcerers. Driven mad with power a mortal frame was never meant to hold, that sorcerer carved out his own empire in a matter of months, and by the end of the first year following that event, six more gods had fallen, and six more Great Sorcerers had risen up. And the first of the Sorcerer Wars broke out across the world, as the remaining gods and other races fought to bring down the Great Sorcerers before they broke world into pieces in their own fight for dominance. Two centuries later, that great war was brought to an end with the defeat of the last of the Great Sorcerers of that era. A full twenty four of the Gods had fallen by the end of it, and multiple Great Sorcerers had ravaged their way across the world, creating or enslaving armies and crafting and enchanting weapons of all kinds to serve their desires. The elder races turned to rebuilding what they could and to holding each other fast to the peace. But new races also came into existence during this time and the five hundred years that followed. Kobolds were the first, descended from the vicious Beastmen that some of the early Great Sorcerers created as infantry for their armies- a few generations proved them still to be fierce, but more than willing to adapt to the ways of the elder races and to find their own place in civilization. Gnomes, the descendants of Dwarves who had been forced to the surface in areas where sorcery-fueled earthquakes and destruction made living belowground impossible for generations also formed their own villages and enclaves. And for five hundred years, the lands remained at peace.

Until a group of humans, made bold by the passage of time, and foolish in their ambition, killed and consumed another god. Thinking that splitting the power of one deity amongst multiple sorcerers might make the madness more manageable. And while it did, while the power and madness of the four new Great Sorcerers were indeed less elementally brutal than their predecessors, they were all the mor cunning, ruthless, and calculating in their machinations. The four went their separate ways, each raising their own nations, and war broke forth again.

The remaining gods, choosing to not further fuel the fire of a second war, fled the world, investing their powers in their clerics, temples, and other servants instead. Which left the rest of the world to fight and struggle for three hundred years of strife until the last of the new Great Sorcerers fell. Alchemy and necromancy among other foul arts were brought to the fore, and the creation of blackpowder weaponry among other things caused just as much destruction as the magics wielded in combat. The Peace itself only came because the last of the Great Sorcerers of that time, the self-styled Mordanth, was assumedly consumed by his own magic as he attempted to destroy the allied armies arrayed against him.

A full eight centuries of peace followed the War. Civilization flourished. But the destruction and wreckage of the two previous battles were all buried just underneath the surface. And so it was that a lone wanderer, exploring ancient ruins in the S____ forest, found the skull of Mordanth, and became possessed by the undead spirit of the Great sorcerer, who then raised up his old armies from the grave and other stranger powers to begin the Wars all over again. And other such seekers tapped into other long-buried secrets and powers, and they too rose up. And the Third War was upon us, bringing forth all new forms of disaster. It was during this time that Hollows among other things were first constructed- biological constructs fueled by magic and alchemy and operated by nonmagical pilots, hollows allowed mortals to be able to go toe-to-toe with some of the mot dangerous creations of the Sorcerer Wars, though they drained the very life of the land around them, or in extremis, the lives of their pilots. This war also saw the creation of Augments- people who, whether to replace a lost limb or other body part, or simply to turn a living person into a weapon, replaced their own flesh and bone with magical and alchemically constructed limbs and weapons instead. The last War ended only twenty years ago. The world has rebuilt somewhat, and peace is holding, tenuous at the best of times, but now strained by tension between nations and races that have had centuries of slaughter and destruction to deal with. The land itself has overgrown some of the old battlegrounds, treasures, and ruins, while others still fester and weep like raw sores, poisoning all that come in contact with them. Monsters and abominations created to serve the fury of the Wars still exist and hunt and breed, waiting for preying on those they can find. It is the Fourth Age, the age of the Sundered Lands, and you must find your place in it.

#rpg setting #sundered lands

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legenddeathed · 5 years

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headcanon: swain / the sacred six | Jericho was a member of a black operations military team during war time. During Noxus’ expansionary period, Jericho was part of a team that infiltrated, dismantled, and tortured community leaders and representatives. During the most recent rune wars, and in particular during the Noxian-Ionian war, the Sacred Six committed a variety of atrocities and war crimes. If they were ever caught, they were meant to be a deniable squad of expert killers and executioners for Noxus. There were probably many of such teams from Noxus, but they were all kept separate from each other. The Sacred Six’s existence remains a secret from the general public even today.

The members of the Sacred Six were as follows:

Atticus Morningstar was the doctor and envoy to their commanders. They were a Zaunite and quite young (although not as young as Renee). Because relations between Zaun and Noxus tended to be friendly, they immigrated to Noxus early in their life and joined the armies under Noxian banners since. Their entire right leg and left arm were mechanical, as were three fingers of their right hand. They were an avid scientist and scholar, and enjoyed dissecting enemies – particularly those of other species – when permitted. Because of their dual-nationality connections, they usually spoke with most leadership for the team’s orders.

Marcus Du Couteau was the assassinations expert and self-proclaimed rival to Jericho. Besides the fact that he was a very good assassin, he was easily the most normal out of all of them. Marcus was charming, easygoing, cracked jokes, and was generally personable and friendly to all – including the members of the team. Nothing seemed to faze him, and he was accepted as the most dependable and most efficient in the team. He seemed to find Jericho the most entertaining, as he followed him around everywhere when he could – usually poking fun at Beatrice along the way.

Jericho Swain was the strategist and was responsible for reconnaissance. He was initially commissioned for nothing more, and expected only to use Beatrice and his connection to it as a means for long distance intelligence gathering. However, it soon became clear that more might was required in some missions, and he was called to action. While Jericho remained detached and solitary even among the group, there were probably no other individuals that knew him better than they. War, after all, brings out the truest self of anyone.

Renee Lefebvre was the youngest at twelve, responsible for torture and extraction. Like Jericho, Renee was connected to something more sinister, although the exact nature of the relationship was always unclear. Renee claimed to be an orphan from Demacia who was cast out for her abilities, but later found a home in Noxus. Her origins did not matter as long as she proved her loyalty, however. She would spend all but an hour with subjects before they were screaming their guts out. At times, she was also known to have prophetic dreams and speak prophecies in various tongues as if possessed, but since these sorts of occurrences were rare, they were not depended upon.

Crisoforo Salazar was the expert in disguise and could lie through her teeth. She could likely convince a man he was a rabbit if she chose to. Even within the Six, her true identity remained a mystery. While she claimed that the countenance and name she gave to the team was her true one, her disguises and lies were so complete and convincing that no one really believed her. She gleefully changed faces, names, and personalities like it was nothing. It was suspected she had a mild case of dissociative personality disorder.

Marko Valentin was the sniper and a serial killer. He began as a bounty hunter before deciding he liked the act of killing more than the money. Marko challenged himself to execute clean, precise shots from great distances and under impossible circumstances, such as with multiple people clouding the shot or at rapidly moving targets. The kills themselves were clean, quiet, and efficient, but Marko lacked restraint in frequency. The number of bodies appearing quickly caught up to him, but he was offered military service instead of jail time if he wished to take it. He was proficient in both shotguns and the bow and arrow, and also happened to be very handsome.

While each of them had their “official” roles, every member of the Sacred Six were expected to participate in the missions as required. For example, while Marcus was the assigned assassin, Crisoforo, Renee, and Jericho were sometimes tasked to help with assassinations. Marko might be assigned sniper duty, but Marcus, Atticus, and others would be expected to be present for combat.

Of all of them, Renee and Jericho were the only magic users or magically aligned members. Marcus and Marko excelled in physical aspects, and while Crisoforo and Atticus were not combat specialists, they were markedly shrewd and used their own forms of fighting when necessary.

It was Jericho’s membership in this team and, specifically, his connections with Atticus that segued him into membership with the Black Rose.

Upon the end of the Ionian-Noxian war, the Sacred Six quietly separated, although all the members remained in Noxus should their talents be required again. However, over time, they all began to disappear, one by one. The reasons were always unknown, but since it’s been confirmed Jericho murdered Marcus, you can imagine what happened to the rest.

#headcanons #headcanons: swain #btw i headcanoned swain killed marcus before they made it officially canon #JUST SAYING...

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ehyde · 7 years

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Worlds Unseen, chapter 7 (epilogue)

Yona’s mission to take down Hiyou and rid the Water Tribe of nadai is interrupted by the appearance of a ship floating in the sky … and by the revelation that neither Lili nor Suwon are the people she believed them to be.

(Part of a scifi au where the dragons and all of Kouka’s history are the same as in canon, but there is also a sort of alien invasion happening. Also, Suwon is an AI.)

(read from the beginning on AO3)

Author’s note: I’m sorry if the ending feels abrupt. I never intended for this fic to tell the full story of this AU, it was always meant to just be “Yona’s first contact story.” From the start, I decided I’d write about this AU through interconnected short stories, so that I wasn’t taking on a huge project all at once and so that I could go wherever inspiration took me, rather than telling the story in chronological order. But the pacing of this particular fic gave me some trouble and it actually ended up longer than I expected. Anyway, if you’re wondering about unaddressed plot threads, don’t worry--those are all stories that I intend to tell, just not in the context of this fic.

And now, on to the final chapter!

“Miss Tetora, Shinah keeps telling me how beautiful you are…”

“Oh?” Tetora teased Jaeha with a smile, forcing him to actually ask the question.

“We’re leaving for Fuuga tomorrow morning,” said Jae-ha. “Won’t you give me just a glimpse before we go?”

Yona and all her friends sat on the hillside below the university’s observatory, watching the inky blue dusk fade into night. A week had passed since they arrived, a week full of new ideas, but also occasional quiet moments like this. And now, Yona felt they had done all they could here. It was time to move on.

“He's...like this,” said Shinah. He, of course, had held out for much longer against Jaeha’s curious gaze.

“I'd like to see Miss Tetora's true form, too!” a young voice piped up. The maid who had been so startled by Lili on that first morning—her name was Taesa—had since become an avid follower of the three outworlders. Her devotion annoyed Lili—or at least it seemed to; Yona thought that Lili was secretly delighted by it. She had the night off, as Yong-hi had set out for Hiryuu Castle earlier that evening.

Tetora laughed. “Do I really have this many admirers?” she asked. “Well, in that case…” The image of the blonde human woman flickered, then was replaced by the alien form that Yona and Zeno had seen before. Her skin was a glistening blue-grey, her eyes solid, inky black, and in place of hair, numerous tendrils, almost like an octopus’ tentacles, extended from her head. But even Yona had to blink in surprise—each of those tendrils was illuminated by dots of light. The glowing bioluminescence—which also accented her face and arms—gave her a completely different look than what Yona had seen before under the bright artificial lights of their ship.

“Oh…” Jaeha breathed. “You’re a constellation.” He reached out a hand to brush his fingers against her skin.

“Careful,” said Tetora. “I might sting you.”

“I might enjoy that,” said Jaeha.

“You’d die,” said Ayura flatly, reaching for Tetora’s arm to pull her away. She, like Lili, had discarded her human guise long ago.

“You’re a different species entirely, aren’t you?” Yun asked. “You’re nothing like Lili and Ayura. Does that mean you’re from different planets?” Tetora nodded. “And is that why you waited so long to let us see?”

Tetora shrugged. “It seemed better not to confuse matters,” she said. “Most of the outworlders you’ll meet are aven, like Lili and Ayura.”

“Yeah, Tetora’s pretty unique,” said Lili. “There’s a good chance you’ll never see anyone else like her.”

“Then I thank you for the opportunity,” said Jaeha.

Interesting, thought Yona. Lili had told them of an alliance of worlds all across the stars. It only made sense that those worlds would have people as different from each other as Lili was from her. She looked back up at the sky. More stars shone now, blinking into view as the deep blue faded to black. “Shinah,” she said. “Can you see those other worlds?”

The blue dragon shook his head. “Not those,” he said. “But...other things. The metal boxes that fly around the world. Those...weren’t always here, so...they’re yours?” he asked, turning to Lili.

“Metal boxes...the AI’s satellites? No way. You can see them?” Shinah nodded. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” she grumbled.

“Lili, what is this ‘AI?’” Yun asked. “You keep mentioning it, but you never explained.”

“It's…” Lili glanced at Yona, and Yona nodded. She'd been putting this off for too long, but her friends needed to know. Hak needed to know. “Actually, it’ll probably be a little easier to explain now. You started learning how to use Lady Yong-hi’s computer, right?”

“Right!” said Yun. “That thing’s pretty amazing, the way it can put information together so quickly. And they’re common in your world? Anyone can use them?”

“Yes, well, actually the model Lady Yong-hi has is pretty basic. An AI is a computer, too, but it’s way more powerful. AI means artificial intelligence, see. It’s basically a person,” Lili admitted. “A person with the mind of a computer.” She had once insisted, repeatedly, that Suwon wasn’t a person. Yona wondered what had changed. Had Lili spoken with him more, in the time that they were here? “The Company built a computer that could control their whole operation here,” Lili continued. “It had to be able to think independently enough to make its own decisions, but since it's a computer, emotions aren’t a factor. Its loyalty to the Company was never supposed to be an issue.”

“How awful,” mused Jaeha. “To be created for a single purpose, rendered unable to rebel by your very nature.”

“But it must have,” said Yun. “Otherwise we'd be trying to fight it, right?”

“He decided that out of his directives, 'protect Kouka’ took priority over 'serve the Company,’” said Lili. “I’m not sure if he even knows if that’s rebellion or not.”

Hak stiffened. Was he starting to figure it out? “A box that can think can't do any of that,” he said. “It would need—”

“It’s Suwon,” said Yona. She couldn’t stand the wait, the lie, any longer. “Suwon has been that for nearly as long as we knew him.”

No one spoke. Finally, Hak stood up. “Figures,” was all he said as he turned and walked away into the darkness.

“Hak! Hak!” Yona finally caught up with Hak at the base of the hill, at the edge of the forest surrounding the university. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I should have told you sooner. But I couldn't—I’m still trying to understand—”

“Oh?” Hak asked. “Doesn't seem too hard to me. He never really cared about anyone.”

“But...I don't think that's true.”

Hak dropped her hand and turned to face her head-on, looking down at her incredulously. “You still have feelings for him? Now?”

“No, Hak.” Yona gripped the fabric of her skirt, playing with it in her hands as she tried to formulate her thoughts. “Not...those feelings. But I keep wondering...someone, no, something like him, would he really choose Kouka over the Company if he didn’t care? I feel like, on some level, he must.” She shook her head. “Maybe I’m just weak. I’ve been given every reason to believe his kindness meant nothing, and I still—I still can’t—”

Hak took her by the shoulders and pulled her close. “Foolish, maybe,” he said. “But I could never call you weak.” Tears threatened to pour down from Yona’s eyes, blurring her vision as she looked up at Hak. What was he talking about? He’d called her weak hundreds of times.

Brushing back the hair that had fallen over her face, Hak made no comments about the tear he caught while doing so. Was she crying for Hak, who was here by her side? Or for Suwon, who she knew was lost to her forever? She reached for Hak's hand again, then looked up at the starry heavens. “The sky seems so much closer now,” she said. “But it’s still beyond my reach.”

Hak squeezed her hand tight. “I’m not going to try to understand Suwon,” said Hak. “I don’t want to understand him. But if this is the path you want to take, I’ll follow you.”

They walked, hand in hand, back up the hill to where the others waited for them. They said nothing about Suwon—they didn’t need to ask why Yona had kept that back for so long. “Tomorrow, we’re leaving this place,” said Yona. Tomorrow, if they wished, they could pretend that none of this had ever happened. How different the world seemed than it had only a week ago! “Lili, when your ship first carried me away, I thought I was going to lose everything—you, my friends, my entire world. I was so afraid. But I'm glad it happened.”

“You've said enough stuff like that, I should probably get it into my head that you really mean it.”

“I do,” Yona assured her. “And I wish I could stay by your side.” But that would be impossible. Staying with Lili would mean staying with Suwon, in one form or another. As much as she wanted to believe he still cared, as much as she knew, somehow, that his kindness wasn't a lie, she still remembered what he'd done. Still remembered the other time her world had changed before her eyes, remembered the instinctive terror that filled her at merely the sound of his voice. Hak lied. She was still weak. Still, they both fought for Kouka. Perhaps one day they'd fight side by side. Perhaps one day she’d understand him, understand her own feelings, enough to make working together possible. But not now.

“You don't need to,” said Lili. “Yona, I never expected to make friends on this world at all, let alone friends who knew the truth. You showed me something about the people of this world I never would have figured out on my own. Our fight against the Company might only be possible thanks to Lady Yong-hi’s university and—and an AI who turned against his creators—but it’s thanks to you—all of you—that I know we can win.”

#akatsuki no yona #alien larp au #my fic

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lodelss · 4 years

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Shoshana Zuboff | An excerpt adapted from The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power | PublicAffairs | 2019 | 23 minutes (6,281 words)

In 2000 a group of computer scientists and engineers at Georgia Tech collaborated on a project called the “Aware Home.” It was meant to be a “living laboratory” for the study of “ubiquitous computing.” They imagined a “human-home symbiosis” in which many animate and inanimate processes would be captured by an elaborate network of “context aware sensors” embedded in the house and by wearable computers worn by the home’s occupants. The design called for an “automated wireless collaboration” between the platform that hosted personal information from the occupants’ wearables and a second one that hosted the environmental information from the sensors.

There were three working assumptions: first, the scientists and engineers understood that the new data systems would produce an entirely new knowledge domain. Second, it was assumed that the rights to that new knowledge and the power to use it to improve one’s life would belong exclusively to the people who live in the house. Third, the team assumed that for all of its digital wizardry, the Aware Home would take its place as a modern incarnation of the ancient conventions that understand “home” as the private sanctuary of those who dwell within its walls.

All of this was expressed in the engineering plan. It emphasized trust, simplicity, the sovereignty of the individual, and the inviolability of the home as a private domain. The Aware Home information system was imagined as a simple “closed loop” with only two nodes and controlled entirely by the home’s occupants. Because the house would be “constantly monitoring the occupants’ whereabouts and activities…even tracing its inhabitants’ medical conditions,” the team concluded, “there is a clear need to give the occupants knowledge and control of the distribution of this information.” All the information was to be stored on the occupants’ wearable computers “to insure the privacy of an individual’s information.”

By 2018, the global “smart-home” market was valued at $36 billion and expected to reach $151 billion by 2023. The numbers betray an earthquake beneath their surface. Consider just one smart-home device: the Nest thermostat, which was made by a company that was owned by Alphabet, the Google holding company, and then merged with Google in 2018. The Nest thermostat does many things imagined in the Aware Home. It collects data about its uses and environment. It uses motion sensors and computation to “learn” the behaviors of a home’s inhabitants. Nest’s apps can gather data from other connected products such as cars, ovens, fitness trackers, and beds. Such systems can, for example, trigger lights if an anomalous motion is detected, signal video and audio recording, and even send notifications to homeowners or others. As a result of the merger with Google, the thermostat, like other Nest products, will be built with Google’s artificial intelligence capabilities, including its personal digital “assistant.” Like the Aware Home, the thermostat and its brethren devices create immense new stores of knowledge and therefore new power — but for whom?

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Wi-Fi–enabled and networked, the thermostat’s intricate, personalized data stores are uploaded to Google’s servers. Each thermostat comes with a “privacy policy,” a “terms-of-service agreement,” and an “end-user licensing agreement.” These reveal oppressive privacy and security consequences in which sensitive household and personal information are shared with other smart devices, unnamed personnel, and third parties for the purposes of predictive analyses and sales to other unspecified parties. Nest takes little responsibility for the security of the information it collects and none for how the other companies in its ecosystem will put those data to use. A detailed analysis of Nest’s policies by two University of London scholars concluded that were one to enter into the Nest ecosystem of connected devices and apps, each with their own equally burdensome and audacious terms, the purchase of a single home thermostat would entail the need to review nearly a thousand so-called contracts.

Should the customer refuse to agree to Nest’s stipulations, the terms of service indicate that the functionality and security of the thermostat will be deeply compromised, no longer supported by the necessary updates meant to ensure its reliability and safety. The consequences can range from frozen pipes to failed smoke alarms to an easily hacked internal home system.

By 2018, the assumptions of the Aware Home were gone with the wind. Where did they go? What was that wind? The Aware Home, like many other visionary projects, imagined a digital future that empowers individuals to lead more-effective lives. What is most critical is that in the year 2000 this vision naturally assumed an unwavering commitment to the privacy of individual experience. Should an individual choose to render her experience digitally, then she would exercise exclusive rights to the knowledge garnered from such data, as well as exclusive rights to decide how such knowledge might be put to use. Today these rights to privacy, knowledge, and application have been usurped by a bold market venture powered by unilateral claims to others’ experience and the knowledge that flows from it. What does this sea change mean for us, for our children, for our democracies, and for the very possibility of a human future in a digital world? It is the darkening of the digital dream into a voracious and utterly novel commercial project that I call surveillance capitalism.

Surveillance capitalism runs contrary to the early digital dream, consigning the Aware Home to ancient history. Instead, it strips away the illusion that the networked form has some kind of indigenous moral content, that being “connected” is somehow intrinsically pro-social, innately inclusive, or naturally tending toward the democratization of knowledge. Digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience. Google invented and perfected surveillance capitalism in much the same way that a century ago General Motors invented and perfected managerial capitalism. Google was the pioneer of surveillance capitalism in thought and practice, the deep pocket for research and development, and the trailblazer in experimentation and implementation, but it is no longer the only actor on this path. Surveillance capitalism quickly spread to Facebook and later to Microsoft. Evidence suggests that Amazon has veered in this direction, and it is a constant challenge to Apple, both as an external threat and as a source of internal debate and conflict.

As the pioneer of surveillance capitalism, Google launched an unprecedented market operation into the unmapped spaces of the internet, where it faced few impediments from law or competitors, like an invasive species in a landscape free of natural predators. Its leaders drove the systemic coherence of their businesses at a breakneck pace that neither public institutions nor individuals could follow. Google also benefited from historical events when a national security apparatus galvanized by the attacks of 9/11 was inclined to nurture, mimic, shelter, and appropriate surveillance capitalism’s emergent capabilities for the sake of total knowledge and its promise of certainty.

Our personal experiences are scraped and packaged as the means to others’ ends…We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus.

Surveillance capitalists quickly realized that they could do anything they wanted, and they did. They dressed in the fashions of advocacy and emancipation, appealing to and exploiting contemporary anxieties, while the real action was hidden offstage. Theirs was an invisibility cloak woven in equal measure to the rhetoric of the empowering web, the ability to move swiftly, the confidence of vast revenue streams, and the wild, undefended nature of the territory they would conquer and claim. They were protected by the inherent illegibility of the automated processes that they rule, the ignorance that these processes breed, and the sense of inevitability that they foster.

Surveillance capitalism is no longer confined to the competitive dramas of the large internet companies, where behavioral futures markets were first aimed at online advertising. Its mechanisms and economic imperatives have become the default model for most internet-based businesses. Eventually, competitive pressure drove expansion into the offline world, where the same foundational mechanisms that expropriate your online browsing, likes, and clicks are trained on your run in the park, breakfast conversation, or hunt for a parking space. Today’s prediction products are traded in behavioral futures markets that extend beyond targeted online ads to many other sectors, including insurance, retail, finance, and an ever-widening range of goods and services companies determined to participate in these new and profitable markets. Whether it’s a “smart” home device, what the insurance companies call “behavioral underwriting,” or any one of thousands of other transactions, we now pay for our own domination.

Surveillance capitalism’s products and services are not the objects of a value exchange. They do not establish constructive producer-consumer reciprocities. Instead, they are the “hooks” that lure users into their extractive operations in which our personal experiences are scraped and packaged as the means to others’ ends. We are not surveillance capitalism’s “customers.” Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.

Google is to surveillance capitalism what the Ford Motor Company and General Motors were to mass-production–based managerial capitalism. New economic logics and their commercial models are discovered by people in a time and place and then perfected through trial and error. In our time Google became the pioneer, discoverer, elaborator, experimenter, lead practitioner, role model, and diffusion hub of surveillance capitalism. GM and Ford’s iconic status as pioneers of twentieth-century capitalism made them enduring objects of scholarly research and public fascination because the lessons they had to teach resonated far beyond the individual companies. Google’s practices deserve the same kind of examination, not merely as a critique of a single company but rather as the starting point for the codification of a powerful new form of capitalism.

With the triumph of mass production at Ford and for decades thereafter, hundreds of researchers, businesspeople, engineers, journalists, and scholars would excavate the circumstances of its invention, origins, and consequences. Decades later, scholars continued to write extensively about Ford, the man and the company. GM has also been an object of intense scrutiny. It was the site of Peter Drucker’s field studies for his seminal Concept of the Corporation, the 1946 book that codified the practices of the twentieth-century business organization and established Drucker’s reputation as a management sage. In addition to the many works of scholarship and analysis on these two firms, their own leaders enthusiastically articulated their discoveries and practices. Henry Ford and his general manager, James Couzens, and Alfred Sloan and his marketing man, Henry “Buck” Weaver, reflected on, conceptualized, and proselytized their achievements, specifically locating them in the evolutionary drama of American capitalism.

Google is a notoriously secretive company, and one is hard-pressed to imagine a Drucker equivalent freely roaming the scene and scribbling in the hallways. Its executives carefully craft their messages of digital evangelism in books and blog posts, but its operations are not easily accessible to outside researchers or journalists. In 2016 a lawsuit brought against the company by a product manager alleged an internal spying program in which employees are expected to identify coworkers who violate the firm’s confidentiality agreement: a broad prohibition against divulging anything about the company to anyone. The closest thing we have to a Buck Weaver or James Couzens codifying Google’s practices and objectives is the company’s longtime chief economist, Hal Varian, who aids the cause of understanding with scholarly articles that explore important themes. Varian has been described as “the Adam Smith of the discipline of Googlenomics” and the “godfather” of its advertising model. It is in Varian’s work that we find hidden-in-plain-sight important clues to the logic of surveillance capitalism and its claims to power.

In two extraordinary articles in scholarly journals, Varian explored the theme of “computer-mediated transactions” and their transformational effects on the modern economy. Both pieces are written in amiable, down-to-earth prose, but Varian’s casual understatement stands in counterpoint to his often-startling declarations: “Nowadays there is a computer in the middle of virtually every transaction…now that they are available these computers have several other uses.” He then identifies four such new uses: “data extraction and analysis,” “new contractual forms due to better monitoring,” “personalization and customization,” and “continuous experiments.”

Varian’s discussions of these new “uses” are an unexpected guide to the strange logic of surveillance capitalism, the division of learning that it shapes, and the character of the information civilization toward which it leads. “Data extraction and analysis,” Varian writes, “is what everyone is talking about when they talk about big data.”

Google was incorporated in 1998, founded by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin just two years after the Mosaic browser threw open the doors of the world wide web to the computer-using public. From the start, the company embodied the promise of information capitalism as a liberating and democratic social force that galvanized and delighted second-modernity populations around the world.

Thanks to this wide embrace, Google successfully imposed computer mediation on broad new domains of human behavior as people searched online and engaged with the web through a growing roster of Google services. As these new activities were informated for the first time, they produced wholly new data resources. For example, in addition to key words, each Google search query produces a wake of collateral data such as the number and pattern of search terms, how a query is phrased, spelling, punctuation, dwell times, click patterns, and location.

There was no reliable way to turn investors’ money into revenue…The behavioral value reinvestment cycle produced a very cool search function, but it was not yet capitalism.

Early on, these behavioral by-products were haphazardly stored and operationally ignored. Amit Patel, a young Stanford graduate student with a special interest in “data mining,” is frequently credited with the groundbreaking insight into the significance of Google’s accidental data caches. His work with these data logs persuaded him that detailed stories about each user — thoughts, feelings, interests — could be constructed from the wake of unstructured signals that trailed every online action. These data, he concluded, actually provided a “broad sensor of human behavior” and could be put to immediate use in realizing cofounder Larry Page’s dream of Search as a comprehensive artificial intelligence.

Google’s engineers soon grasped that the continuous flows of collateral behavioral data could turn the search engine into a recursive learning system that constantly improved search results and spurred product innovations such as spell check, translation, and voice recognition. As Kenneth Cukier observed at that time,

Other search engines in the 1990s had the chance to do the same, but did not pursue it. Around 2000 Yahoo! saw the potential, but nothing came of the idea. It was Google that recognized the gold dust in the detritus of its interactions with its users and took the trouble to collect it up…Google exploits information that is a by-product of user interactions, or data exhaust, which is automatically recycled to improve the service or create an entirely new product.

What had been regarded as waste material — “data exhaust” spewed into Google’s servers during the combustive action of Search — was quickly reimagined as a critical element in the transformation of Google’s search engine into a reflexive process of continuous learning and improvement.

At that early stage of Google’s development, the feedback loops involved in improving its Search functions produced a balance of power: Search needed people to learn from, and people needed Search to learn from. This symbiosis enabled Google’s algorithms to learn and produce ever-more relevant and comprehensive search results. More queries meant more learning; more learning produced more relevance. More relevance meant more searches and more users. By the time the young company held its first press conference in 1999, to announce a $25 million equity investment from two of the most revered Silicon Valley venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, Google Search was already fielding seven million requests each day. A few years later, Hal Varian, who joined Google as its chief economist in 2002, would note, “Every action a user performs is considered a signal to be analyzed and fed back into the system.” The Page Rank algorithm, named after its founder, had already given Google a significant advantage in identifying the most popular results for queries. Over the course of the next few years it would be the capture, storage, analysis, and learning from the by-products of those search queries that would turn Google into the gold standard of web search.

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The key point for us rests on a critical distinction. During this early period, behavioral data were put to work entirely on the user’s behalf. User data provided value at no cost, and that value was reinvested in the user experience in the form of improved services: enhancements that were also offered at no cost to users. Users provided the raw material in the form of behavioral data, and those data were harvested to improve speed, accuracy, and relevance and to help build ancillary products such as translation. I call this the behavioral value reinvestment cycle, in which all behavioral data are reinvested in the improvement of the product or service.

The cycle emulates the logic of the iPod; it worked beautifully at Google but with one critical difference: the absence of a sustainable market transaction. In the case of the iPod, the cycle was triggered by the purchase of a high-margin physical product. Subsequent reciprocities improved the iPod product and led to increased sales. Customers were the subjects of the commercial process, which promised alignment with their “what I want, when I want, where I want” demands. At Google, the cycle was similarly oriented toward the individual as its subject, but without a physical product to sell, it floated outside the marketplace, an interaction with “users” rather than a market transaction with customers.

This helps to explain why it is inaccurate to think of Google’s users as its customers: there is no economic exchange, no price, and no profit. Nor do users function in the role of workers. When a capitalist hires workers and provides them with wages and means of production, the products that they produce belong to the capitalist to sell at a profit. Not so here. Users are not paid for their labor, nor do they operate the means of production. Finally, people often say that the user is the “product.” This is also misleading. Users are not products, but rather we are the sources of raw-material supply. Surveillance capitalism’s unusual products manage to be derived from our behavior while remaining indifferent to our behavior. Its products are about predicting us, without actually caring what we do or what is done to us.

At this early stage of Google’s development, whatever Search users inadvertently gave up that was of value to the company they also used up in the form of improved services. In this reinvestment cycle, serving users with amazing Search results “consumed” all the value that users created when they provided extra behavioral data. The fact that users needed Search about as much as Search needed users created a balance of power between Google and its populations. People were treated as ends in themselves, the subjects of a nonmarket, self-contained cycle that was perfectly aligned with Google’s stated mission “to organize the world’s information, making it universally accessible and useful.”

By 1999, despite the splendor of Google’s new world of searchable web pages, its growing computer science capabilities, and its glamorous venture backers, there was no reliable way to turn investors’ money into revenue. The behavioral value reinvestment cycle produced a very cool search function, but it was not yet capitalism. The balance of power made it financially risky and possibly counterproductive to charge users a fee for search services. Selling search results would also have set a dangerous precedent for the firm, assigning a price to indexed information that Google’s web crawler had already taken from others without payment. Without a device like Apple’s iPod or its digital songs, there were no margins, no surplus, nothing left over to sell and turn into revenue.

Google had relegated advertising to steerage class: its AdWords team consisted of seven people, most of whom shared the founders’ general antipathy toward ads. The tone had been set in Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s milestone paper that unveiled their search engine conception, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” presented at the 1998 World Wide Web Conference: “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market…we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.”

Google’s first revenues depended instead on exclusive licensing deals to provide web services to portals such as Yahoo! and Japan’s BIGLOBE. It also generated modest revenue from sponsored ads linked to search query keywords. There were other models for consideration. Rival search engines such as Overture, used exclusively by the then-giant portal AOL, or Inktomi, the search engine adopted by Microsoft, collected revenues from the sites whose pages they indexed. Overture was also successful in attracting online ads with its policy of allowing advertisers to pay for high-ranking search listings, the very format that Brin and Page scorned.

Prominent analysts publicly doubted whether Google could compete with its more-established rivals. As the New York Times asked, “Can Google create a business model even remotely as good as its technology?” A well-known Forrester Research analyst proclaimed that there were only a few ways for Google to make money with Search: “build a portal [like Yahoo!]…partner with a portal…license the technology…wait for a big company to purchase them.”

Despite these general misgivings about Google’s viability, the firm’s prestigious venture backing gave the founders confidence in their ability to raise money. This changed abruptly in April 2000, when the legendary dot-com economy began its steep plunge into recession, and Silicon Valley’s Garden of Eden unexpectedly became the epicenter of a financial earthquake.

The idea of being able to deliver a particular message to a particular person at just the moment when it might have a high probability of actually influencing his or her behavior was, and had always been, the holy grail of advertising.

By mid-April, Silicon Valley’s fast-money culture of privilege was under siege with the implosion of what came to be known as the “dot-com bubble.” It is easy to forget exactly how terrifying things were for the valley’s ambitious young people and their slightly older investors. Startups with outsized valuations just months earlier were suddenly forced to shutter. Prominent articles such as “Doom Stalks the Dotcoms” noted that the stock prices of Wall Street’s most-revered internet “high flyers” were “down for the count,” with many of them trading below their initial offering price: “With many dotcoms declining, neither venture capitalists nor Wall Street is eager to give them a dime…” The news brimmed with descriptions of shell-shocked investors. The week of April 10 saw the worst decline in the history of the NASDAQ, where many internet companies had gone public, and there was a growing consensus that the “game” had irreversibly changed.

As the business environment in Silicon Valley unraveled, investors’ prospects for cashing out by selling Google to a big company seemed far less likely, and they were not immune to the rising tide of panic. Many Google investors began to express doubts about the company’s prospects, and some threatened to withdraw support. Pressure for profit mounted sharply, despite the fact that Google Search was widely considered the best of all the search engines, traffic to its website was surging, and a thousand résumés flooded the firm’s Mountain View office each day. Page and Brin were seen to be moving too slowly, and their top venture capitalists, John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins and Michael Moritz from Sequoia, were frustrated. According to Google chronicler Steven Levy, “The VCs were screaming bloody murder. Tech’s salad days were over, and it wasn’t certain that Google would avoid becoming another crushed radish.”

The specific character of Silicon Valley’s venture funding, especially during the years leading up to dangerous levels of startup inflation, also contributed to a growing sense of emergency at Google. As Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter and his colleague Michel Ferrary found in their study of valley venture firms, “A connection with a high-status VC firm signals the high status of the startup and encourages other agents to link to it.” These themes may seem obvious now, but it is useful to mark the anxiety of those months of sudden crisis. Prestigious risk investment functioned as a form of vetting — much like acceptance to a top university sorts and legitimates students, elevating a few against the backdrop of the many — especially in the “uncertain” environment characteristic of high-tech investing. Loss of that high-status signaling power assigned a young company to a long list of also-rans in Silicon Valley’s fast-moving saga.

Other research findings point to the consequences of the impatient money that flooded the valley as inflationary hype drew speculators and ratcheted up the volatility of venture funding. Studies of pre-bubble investment patterns showed a “big-score” mentality in which bad results tended to stimulate increased investing as funders chased the belief that some young company would suddenly discover the elusive business model destined to turn all their bets into rivers of gold. Startup mortality rates in Silicon Valley outstripped those for other venture capital centers such as Boston and Washington, DC, with impatient money producing a few big wins and many losses. Impatient money is also reflected in the size of Silicon Valley startups, which during this period were significantly smaller than in other regions, employing an average of 68 employees as compared to an average of 112 in the rest of the country. This reflects an interest in quick returns without spending much time on growing a business or deepening its talent base, let alone developing the institutional capabilities. These propensities were exacerbated by the larger Silicon Valley culture, where net worth was celebrated as the sole measure of success for valley parents and their children.

For all their genius and principled insights, Brin and Page could not ignore the mounting sense of emergency. By December 2000, the Wall Street Journal reported on the new “mantra” emerging from Silicon Valley’s investment community: “Simply displaying the ability to make money will not be enough to remain a major player in the years ahead. What will be required will be an ability to show sustained and exponential profits.”

The declaration of a state of exception functions in politics as cover for the suspension of the rule of law and the introduction of new executive powers justified by crisis. At Google in late 2000, it became a rationale for annulling the reciprocal relationship that existed between Google and its users, steeling the founders to abandon their passionate and public opposition to advertising. As a specific response to investors’ anxiety, the founders tasked the tiny AdWords team with the objective of looking for ways to make more money. Page demanded that the whole process be simplified for advertisers. In this new approach, he insisted that advertisers “shouldn’t even get involved with choosing keywords — Google would choose them.”

Operationally, this meant that Google would turn its own growing cache of behavioral data and its computational power and expertise toward the single task of matching ads with queries. New rhetoric took hold to legitimate this unusual move. If there was to be advertising, then it had to be “relevant” to users. Ads would no longer be linked to keywords in a search query, but rather a particular ad would be “targeted” to a particular individual. Securing this holy grail of advertising would ensure relevance to users and value to Advertisers.

Absent from the new rhetoric was the fact that in pursuit of this new aim, Google would cross into virgin territory by exploiting sensitivities that only its exclusive and detailed collateral behavioral data about millions and later billions of users could reveal. To meet the new objective, the behavioral value reinvestment cycle was rapidly and secretly subordinated to a larger and more complex undertaking. The raw materials that had been solely used to improve the quality of search results would now also be put to use in the service of targeting advertising to individual users. Some data would continue to be applied to service improvement, but the growing stores of collateral signals would be repurposed to improve the profitability of ads for both Google and its advertisers. These behavioral data available for uses beyond service improvement constituted a surplus, and it was on the strength of this behavioral surplus that the young company would find its way to the “sustained and exponential profits” that would be necessary for survival. Thanks to a perceived emergency, a new mutation began to gather form and quietly slip its moorings in the implicit advocacy-oriented social contract of the firm’s original relationship with users.

Google’s declared state of exception was the backdrop for 2002, the watershed year during which surveillance capitalism took root. The firm’s appreciation of behavioral surplus crossed another threshold that April, when the data logs team arrived at their offices one morning to find that a peculiar phrase had surged to the top of the search queries: “Carol Brady’s maiden name.” Why the sudden interest in a 1970s television character? It was data scientist and logs team member Amit Patel who recounted the event to the New York Times, noting, “You can’t interpret it unless you know what else is going on in the world.”

The team went to work to solve the puzzle. First, they discerned that the pattern of queries had produced five separate spikes, each beginning at forty-eight minutes after the hour. Then they learned that the query pattern occurred during the airing of the popular TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The spikes reflected the successive time zones during which the show aired, ending in Hawaii. In each time zone, the show’s host posed the question of Carol Brady’s maiden name, and in each zone the queries immediately flooded into Google’s servers.

As the New York Times reported, “The precision of the Carol Brady data was eye-opening for some.” Even Brin was stunned by the clarity of Search’s predictive power, revealing events and trends before they “hit the radar” of traditional media. As he told the Times, “It was like trying an electron microscope for the first time. It was like a moment-by-moment barometer.” Google executives were described by the Times as reluctant to share their thoughts about how their massive stores of query data might be commercialized. “There is tremendous opportunity with this data,” one executive confided.

Just a month before the Carol Brady moment, while the AdWords team was already working on new approaches, Brin and Page hired Eric Schmidt, an experienced executive, engineer, and computer science Ph.D., as chairman. By August, they appointed him to the CEO’s role. Doerr and Moritz had been pushing the founders to hire a professional manager who would know how to pivot the firm toward profit. Schmidt immediately implemented a “belt-tightening” program, grabbing the budgetary reins and heightening the general sense of financial alarm as fund-raising prospects came under threat. A squeeze on workspace found him unexpectedly sharing his office with none other than Amit Patel.

Schmidt later boasted that as a result of their close quarters over the course of several months, he had instant access to better revenue figures than did his own financial planners. We do not know (and may never know) what other insights Schmidt might have gleaned from Patel about the predictive power of Google’s behavioral data stores, but there is no doubt that a deeper grasp of the predictive power of data quickly shaped Google’s specific response to financial emergency, triggering the crucial mutation that ultimately turned AdWords, Google, the internet, and the very nature of information capitalism toward an astonishingly lucrative surveillance project.

That this no longer seems astonishing to us, or perhaps even worthy of note, is evidence of the profound psychic numbing that has inured us to a bold and unprecedented shift in capitalist methods.

Google’s earliest ads had been considered more effective than most online advertising at the time because they were linked to search queries and Google could track when users actually clicked on an ad, known as the “click-through” rate. Despite this, advertisers were billed in the conventional manner according to how many people viewed an ad. As Search expanded, Google created the self-service system called AdWords, in which a search that used the advertiser’s keyword would include that advertiser’s text box and a link to its landing page. Ad pricing depended upon the ad’s position on the search results page.

Rival search startup Overture had developed an online auction system for web page placement that allowed it to scale online advertising targeted to keywords. Google would produce a transformational enhancement to that model, one that was destined to alter the course of information capitalism. As a Bloomberg journalist explained in 2006, “Google maximizes the revenue it gets from that precious real estate by giving its best position to the advertiser who is likely to pay Google the most in total, based on the price per click multiplied by Google’s estimate of the likelihood that someone will actually click on the ad.” That pivotal multiplier was the result of Google’s advanced computational capabilities trained on its most significant and secret discovery: behavioral surplus. From this point forward, the combination of ever-increasing machine intelligence and ever-more-vast supplies of behavioral surplus would become the foundation of an unprecedented logic of accumulation. Google’s reinvestment priorities would shift from merely improving its user offerings to inventing and institutionalizing the most far-reaching and technologically advanced raw-material supply operations that the world had ever seen. Henceforth, revenues and growth would depend upon more behavioral surplus.

Google’s many patents filed during those early years illustrate the explosion of discovery, inventiveness, and complexity detonated by the state of exception that led to these crucial innovations and the firm’s determination to advance the capture of behavioral surplus. One patent submitted in 2003 by three of the firm’s top computer scientists is titled “Generating User Information for Use in Targeted Advertising.” The patent is emblematic of the new mutation and the emerging logic of accumulation that would define Google’s success. Of even greater interest, it also provides an unusual glimpse into the “economic orientation” baked deep into the technology cake by reflecting the mindset of Google’s distinguished scientists as they harnessed their knowledge to the firm’s new aims. In this way, the patent stands as a treatise on a new political economics of clicks and its moral universe, before the company learned to disguise this project in a fog of euphemism.

The patent reveals a pivoting of the backstage operation toward Google’s new audience of genuine customers. “The present invention concerns advertising,” the inventors announce. Despite the enormous quantity of demographic data available to advertisers, the scientists note that much of an ad budget “is simply wasted…it is very difficult to identify and eliminate such waste.”

Advertising had always been a guessing game: art, relationships, conventional wisdom, standard practice, but never “science.” The idea of being able to deliver a particular message to a particular person at just the moment when it might have a high probability of actually influencing his or her behavior was, and had always been, the holy grail of advertising. The inventors point out that online ad systems had also failed to achieve this elusive goal. The then-predominant approaches used by Google’s competitors, in which ads were targeted to keywords or content, were unable to identify relevant ads “for a particular user.” Now the inventors offered a scientific solution that exceeded the most-ambitious dreams of any advertising executive:

There is a need to increase the relevancy of ads served for some user request, such as a search query or a document request…to the user that submitted the request…The present invention may involve novel methods, apparatus, message formats and/or data structures for determining user profile information and using such determined user profile information for ad serving.

In other words, Google would no longer mine behavioral data strictly to improve service for users but rather to read users’ minds for the purposes of matching ads to their interests, as those interests are deduced from the collateral traces of online behavior. With Google’s unique access to behavioral data, it would now be possible to know what a particular individual in a particular time and place was thinking, feeling, and doing. That this no longer seems astonishing to us, or perhaps even worthy of note, is evidence of the profound psychic numbing that has inured us to a bold and unprecedented shift in capitalist methods.

The techniques described in the patent meant that each time a user queries Google’s search engine, the system simultaneously presents a specific configuration of a particular ad, all in the fraction of a moment that it takes to fulfill the search query. The data used to perform this instant translation from query to ad, a predictive analysis that was dubbed “matching,” went far beyond the mere denotation of search terms. New data sets were compiled that would dramatically enhance the accuracy of these predictions. These data sets were referred to as “user profile information” or “UPI.” These new data meant that there would be no more guesswork and far less waste in the advertising budget. Mathematical certainty would replace all of that.

* * *

From THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff. Reprinted with permission from PublicAffairs, a division of the Hachette Book Group.

Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor emerita, Harvard Business School. She is the author of In The Age of the Smart Machine: the Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism.

Longreads Editor: Dana Snitzky

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flavoroptimizer · 6 years

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Part one

For someone who secretly hid a frothing hair-trigger temper beneath the paper thin varnish of his self-control, he was remarkably good at meditating himself back into a state of calm composure. This was especially true given the fact that he was but ten years of age. To any onlooker, the child would seem perfectly at ease with the animals he’d been tasked with watching. His eyes were on the grazing cows, but his good hand was absentmindedly stroking the herd dog’s ears as he had been since she’d returned to receive her congratulatory praise from her favorite biped for a job well done. She had worked herself hard to successfully encircle the straying cows back into a manageable circle and deserved appreciation for her trouble. The task itself was neither easy nor relaxing. There were too many variables that could cause everything to go wrong at any moment. The fact that he had been born with a lame hand made it difficult for him to unwind with any small amount of effort. Necessity required him to be careful with both the cows and the canine. The dog could easily overwork herself into a heat stroke or yip a little too enthusiastically at the heals of the cows and become grievously injured if the animal startled and kicked at her. The dog’s help was invaluable to him when he was looking after his employer’s herd. He had learned that his efforts alone were not enough to successfully complete the task the very first day he’d been on the job. The way the lesson had been taught made it unlikely he would forget it in this lifetime. To him, it had made the dogs worth priceless. If he were expected to do this job he could not be deprived of his work partner, so she needed a firm hand to carefully manage the instincts her breeders had prized in her species. The Cows, on the other hand, were sacred in his society. They were held in high esteem for their role in tilling the earth, providing fertilizer for agriculture, the many uses of their milk, their connection to several important gods and goddesses, and these were just the start of a very long list he hadn’t fully memorized. He couldn't list everything because he was illiterate and because hed been seven and distracted at the time hed first heard about the role of cows. It had been years, but the fear of punishment for his inattention still prevented him from admitting to anyone that he hadn't given his full attention to the lessons in theology the sculpturist had imparted om his audience. Instead, his attention had been on watching the man work to create an intricately carved statue of a cow and her calf as a gift for the lady of the house. He wouldn't dare use age as an excuse. Behavior that was seen as an expected response for most children was rarely acceptable when it concerned him. His employers, like most of the English, dismissed the existence of any deities beyond the three they worshipped as the ramblings of the local ‘heathens’ but they likewise valued the cows for almost all of the above reasons themselves. Uncomfortably for many of the servants, they also valued them for food. At first, they'd been happy to buy their beef and dairy products from the market, but experience had made them reevaluate the decision. They had been seen as easy targets and had been taken advantage by both fellow Englishmen and the locals, paying good money for what the merchants had likely known was watered down milk and bad meat. Few things ruined an appetite than finding cooked worms in the meat when you did not expect it. One of the avian servants had eaten it, but the employers had been furious with the salesman. They'd wanted a refund but when they went back the next day the man had disappeared. With the milk, they couldn't be entirely certain if it had been watered down but a weakness in flavor was noted on more than one occasion. Taking these occurrences to heart, they had decided that the best way to prevent a repeat performance was to buy cows of their own to ensure the quality of both the milk the animals produced and the meat that was cleaved from their bodies. Young or old, both were sacrificed to keep the herd population low enough to ensure they did not grow to numbers beyond what they believed the farm’s acreage could hold. He didn’t feel particularly comfortable knowing that he was expected to be part of a process where, if a cow had outlived her usefulness or the owners craved the tender flesh of calves, they would have them killed and eat them as easily as any other animal. However, his employers were foreign invaders. They didn’t care if cows were sacred. They didn't care that in this country they now occupied vegetarianism was the superior cuisine. It was the menu favored by the Brahmin, the personages who occupied the highest levels of the caste system. The consumption of meat itself was considered Beneath the upper castes because it reeked of violence and was a symbol of the spiritually unclean dirtiness of the lower castes. But again they were the British. This was how they operated on more than one level. He could accept that they wanted foods that were impure, but he wished he didn't have to be involved in what many would view as sacrilege. Unfortunately, ever the opportunist, his mother had informed them that through his Grandfather, he was of Gurjara heritage, which made him a member of the shepherding caste. His mother had been looking for a socially acceptable way to release herself from the obligation of looking after her son. An important opportunity had been recognized the instant she overheard their employers grumbling about the “laziness” of Indians who refused to take on tasks outside their caste. And the whining the madam had made over the hassle of vetting servants and how recommendations could be easily forged by unscrupulous men who saw nothing wrong with taking advantage of them for money. They'd been pleased when she’d volunteered her offspring as a(n) (un)willing sacrifice before them. Their English employers hadn’t cared whether the servant looking after their new livestock was of the appropriate caste, of course. They simply hadn’t wanted to break in any new servants. He'd been little more than a year old when he'd first joined their household and knew the majority of the rules. His mother had also spent years in their service and had married the cook after his birth. This had apparently made him seem a decent fit for the role they had in mind. When he protested that he hadn't wanted to take up the task, he’d been warned that if he were to protest they would be forced to hire someone to take his job and he would no longer be welcome. The thought of being left to the streets to fend for himself was a powerful motivator. He hadn't liked how they had forced him to acknowledge how little he meant to anyone as a person. Even worse was acknowledging that he was not a very good person. It should be difficult to help raise sacred animals that were important to the devas to be slaughtered. Every time he chose his life over his religion he should feel as if a little part of his soul died. Instead, he felt very little about the matter at all. The truth was he was a survivor and if this was a test hed rather live with his soul sullied by poor choices with food in his belly and a roof over his head than to live a virtuous life in the slums waiting for illness, starvation, or the violent greedy envy of others to kill him. He knew full well what he was doing was wrong and if it was selfish to choose himself over animals that would die either way…well, then in his silence he was guilty of selfishness. He took the money that was his due and saved it for a time when it was needed. That didn’t mean he felt nothing when a cow seemed to Know what was coming and fled from him on sight. He’d simply had to learn to prepare himself mentally for it. He had been told that rather than a sign of intelligence or foreknowledge on their part, their flight was because they were prey animals and their minds were programmed to recognize threats when they saw one. They fled from him because they had simply been alarmed when he invaded their comfort spaces with intent to separate them from the herd. They would react that way even if they weren't slated to die. He didn’t know if this was true, or if it was meant to make him feel better because the servant who had made the observation had been English. The Englishman couldn't see why there should be so much fuss made over the deaths of cows and thought even less of Lungri and others for caring. In short, he wasn’t a particularly pleasant man to deal with. The man had been one of two servants his employers had brought with them from England whose task had been to watch over the children along with the Indian servants to ensure that they wouldn’t be indoctrinated into either the Hindu or Mohadan religions. 'Local Superstitions’ as he had referred to the religious beliefs of anyone who was not an Anglican had tended to set him off on rants most people only partially understood. Even the other Anglican servant, a soft-spoken and friendly woman who served as the children’s governess was not free from his censure. Her mellow and accepting nature had led him to question her faith because he thought her overly tolerant of the backward ways of the locales. The cook, in particular, had irritated him, the presence of 'papists’ even as far away from home as India seemed to be a sore spot for him. However, he also seemed happiest when he had something to complain about so the cub was unsure how to process the strange behavior. Religious intolerance aside, the man had been a treasure trove of information. He had been friends with a sheepherder in England and knew many tricks of the trade. While Lungri had trouble imagining the deeply unpleasant man associating with friends at all he had tried to listen in the weeks before he’d been officially placed on the duty roster. He had not been born knowing how a shepherd was meant to act and he was deeply uncomfortable to be placed into a role he highly doubted should be sensitive counted as his own. He had never been told his father’s caste so in that aspect he'd been left utterly in the dark. But even after all the thought he had put into learning what would be expected of him, he’d still underestimated just how

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ultralifehackerguru-blog · 6 years

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New Post has been published on http://www.lifehacker.guru/star-wars-10-legends-solo-just-returned-to-canon/

Star Wars: 10 'Legends' SOLO Just Returned To Canon

The Star Wars Expanded Universe may have been rendered ‘Legends,’ but Han Solo’s movie just added a TON back into the franchise’s canon!

WARNING: This article contains SPOILERS for Solo: A Star Wars Story

The expanded world of Star Wars may have been rendered non-canonical when Disney took ownership, but Solo just brought a new batch of fan-favorite stories back into canon. That may not seem like much of a development for casual fans of the films, or even the comics books and video games. But for the passionate fans who spent countless hours soaking up every Star Wars novel for more lore and history, it’s one step closer to seeing their favorite tales given new life.

We can’t promise that Lucasfilm has returned ancient histories of Sith, Jedi, and cosmic empires with the intention of exploring them further. But considering how beloved some of the storytelling being folded back into canon already is, that gesture alone might be enough. Whether you saw Solo or not, these updates shouldn’t be missed.

They may be blink-and-you-miss it additions, or details reveal in supplemental materials for the film, but make no mistake: these Star Wars “Legends” are now the franchise’s official canon.

10 THE LEGACY OF XIM THE DESPOT

Its fitting that of all the Star Wars novels and lore to be referenced in Han Solo’s origin movie, the book trilogy of Han Solo Adventures should get some of the best nods. In the case of the massive crystal skull displayed in Dryden’s trophy room, it isn’t just a jab at George Lucas and Harrison Ford’s famous Indiana Jones movie being made. According to the Official Guide to the film, the object in question is the “myrtag crystal masthead of Xim the Despot.”

The famous cosmic conqueror lived around 25,000 years before these movies, taking over the systems of the Tion Cluster (a major location in Star Wars: The Old Republic) with the first army of battle droids the galaxy had seen. And with each one bearing the symbol of his rule – a skull – this Easter Egg is more than fitting.

So it seems we can add those chapters of his history to the new Star Wars Canon… but it’s not the only part of Xim’s legacy Dryden is concerned with.

9 TAOZIN GRUB

Another one of Dryden Vos’s prized possessions that can actually be glimpsed in the movie is the Taozin Grub, a large cross between a beetle, a centipede, and… well, a grub. It’s preserved, or at least seems to be, and according to the Official Guide was a gift to Dryden from an Imperial Moff (a gesture that makes more sense after learning of the Empire’s connection to Crimson Dawn in the film’s final act). The Taozin shell is famous for resisting blastersaand lights Amber’s, but if the Grub were alive, then Dryden could’ve introduced the audience to the expanded universe of Force-Sensitive creatures.

In the case of the Taozin Grub (so named due to its size, since a full grown Taozin is at least a meter long) that attunement to The Force actually renders them invisible to Force Users, and are able to make anyone or anything connected to then similarly invisible. The creature was introduced in the 2001 novel Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter, with the former Sith explaining how the negative space in The Force was a unique phenomenon. So unique, in fact, that Sith Inquistors operating under Darth Vader were apparently outfitted with amulets made from Taozin, so as to remain undetected by their Jedi Prey.

They may be less famous as the Force-nullifying Ysalamir featured in the Thrawn Trilogy… but it’s a start.

8 MANDALORIAN RALLY MASTER ARMOR

Now, the item most likely to get people’s attention: the large, red, Mandalorian armor on full display in the background of every scene in Vos’s prized trophy room. Some fans assumed that its presence in early photographs was a hint towards Dryden’s Mandalorian heritage, but the armor is far from the standard suit worn by Boba Fett, Jango, or any other modern Mabdalorian. In fact, this armor is a callback to the Knights of the Old Republic fiction previously assumed to be non-canon after Disney purchased Lucasfilm.

Fans will remember it as one variation of Mandalorian Neo-Crusader armor, adopted by the warrior race by the Great Sith War (thousands of years before the Star Wars movies). The standard troops wore blue armor into battle, Field Marshals wore gold, and frontline veterans wore silver. However, the crimson was reserved for Rally Masters, meant to stand out in battle and untie the infantry surrounding them. This history is confirmed in Solo: The Official Guide, referring to the suit as the movie version of “Rally Master Armor.”

7 RWOOKRRORRO, THE WOOKIEE CAPITAL

The shot of Chewbacca and another Wookiee in trailers for Solo sparked instant debate, with fans wondering if Lucasfilm was finally going to bring Chewie’s wife Malla into movie canon (previously seen only in the Star Wars Christmas Special). But alas, the smaller Wookiee is just one of a handful of slaves Chewie rescues when the heroes head to the spice mines of Kessel.

If you’re paying attention, the Wookiee’s fellow slaves actually refer to him by name, “Sagwa,” multiple times during the breakout. But the real addition to the Star Wars movie lore comes in Solo: The Official Guide, when Sagwa is singled out as hailing from the city of Rwookrrorro on the planet Kashyyyk.

Another settlement on the Wookiee homeworld isn’t a shock in itself, but most casual fans won’t know anything beyond the actual name of the planet (and the diehards will know how to actually spell it). But before the planet was officially given its name, Heir to the Empire author Timothy Zahn pitched “Rwookrrorro” as an option. The idea was turned down, so Zahn made it the capital of the planet, instead.

6 THE TEMPLE OF EXAR KUN

When the Star Wars movies revealed that Luke Skywalker had taken only a small handful of students before exiling himself to Ahch-To, fans were crushed. Well, fans of the Jedi Academy novels by Kevin J. Anderson, which had followed Luke’s efforts to found a new Jedi Temple on Yavin 4… and the dark forces that sought to taint his new apprentices.

That sinister influence turned out to be the spirit of Exar Kun, eventually revealed to be a Jedi who had fallen, pursued the ways of the Sith, and declared himself a Sith Lord. When the forces of ‘good’ eventually converged on his immaculate temple – built from obsidian by the enslaved inhabitants of Yavin 4 – Exar Kun channeled the lives of his slaves to preserve his spirit within it. there it sat for four millennia, until his crypt was opened, and Luke’s young Jedi showed him a way out.

RELATED: Star Wars Characters You Didn’t Know Are Joining The Canon

Apparently, the minds at Lucasfilm have decided the story of Exar Kun is too good to erase from canono, as well. Luke may not have founded a temple on Yavin 4, but pay attention to the small table in Dryden Vos’s office built on top of a slab of black stone. The inscriptions visible in heiroglyphics and incantations are confirmed in the film’s official art book to be Sith markings, since the slab of ebony itself is pulled from the Temple of Exar Kun.

5 THE ADVENTURES OF LANDO CALRISSIAN

Typically, the writers of modern Star Wars fiction try to keep their nods to lore or stories now rendered ‘Legends’ somewhat subtle (most of the time, anyway). But then there’s Lando Calrissian. Since subtlety isn’t his style, the owner of the Millennium Falcon brings his expanded universe back into canon through an actual novelization, recorded via hologram as “The Calrissian Chronicles.”

Most of the references made are to L. Neil Smith’s trilogy of Lando adventures, including the hero referencing the Sharu in his holo-recording, right up to the point that he almost utters “mindharp.” But in Dryden Vos’s collection, fans can also catch a glimpse of several Life Crystals, native to the planet Rafa. The precious gems first appeared in The Mindharp of Sharu, later returning in The Flamewind of Oseon (where Lando claims to have taken ownership of “a real money pit”).

Even though the Life Crystals were revealed to drain intelligence of sentient beings around them, Dryden has a handful of the priceless objects near at hand.

4 THE DROCH

Officially referred to in the Solo guide as a “cerulean droch from Felucia,” the large beetle can also be spotted thanks to its silhouette, marked by its many legs. At first glance, it may seem a scarab or rare insect like the many others in Dryden Vos’s trophy room. But believe it or not, this bug’s species is responsible for more deaths in the galaxy than almost any other ruler. It proves Dryden’s nerve, as well. Because centuries ago in the Star Wars universe, these tiny Drochs wiped out billions when their spread was misunderstood as a new ailment: the Death Seed Plague.

The truth of the disease was revealed in the novel Planet of Twilight, when the original trilogy heroes discovered the Droch – tiny beetles that burrow into a host, disguise themselves as natural tissue, and feed on their life force until their skin sheds, and the host dies. Reproducing and gaining sentience with more and more consumed hosts, the Droch plague was almost impossible to stop.

Does one Droch’s appearance here mean Dzym, the Droch who evolved to look almost human, and lead his species to take over the galaxy, is also canon? We’re going to say yes.

3 THE QUEEN OF RANROON

Finally we get to the entire reason that Xim, a cosmic, despotic ruler actually became a person if interest to Han Solo in the first place. After all, if a job doesn’t promise to win him either a ton of credits or a boatload of notoriety, the eodds are low that Han and Chewie are interested. Which is exactly where the Queen of Ranroon comes in: the legendary treasure ship of Xim the Despot, lost to all civilization on a distant world. The main goal of the novel Han Solo and the Lost Legacy, as well.

It’s a classic adventure premise if there ever was one – swap out the spaceship for a wooden one, and it’s a pirate story just as easy. In the book Hand and Chewie really did find the lost treasure ship of Xim the Despot. But they could have used some help from Dryden Vos, who has a dataplaque containing what is basically a stellar version of a treasure map. Why he has such a clue and has yet to cash in on the hunt is anyone’s guess.

That being said, Dryden IS obscenely wealthy… but is he as willing to believe in legend and myth as his Crimson Dawn master, the former Sith Maul? He does have Xim’s crystal skull already…

2 TERÄS KÄSI

Qi’ra shows that she really has done some terrible things in her past – and probably with her bare hands – when she disarms and defeats the head of the Kessel mining operation in a matter of seconds (completely stunning L3-37). As she soon explains, the martial art just put on display is Teräs Käsi which she has learned under the service of Dryden Vos.

The martial art was introduced to the Star Wars mythology with Steve Perry’s Shadows of the Empire novel in 1996. At the time, it was introduced as a fighting style created specifically to oppose the Jedi (or, in theory, and Force User). For all the action in the Star Wars world, there isn’t much actual hand-to-hand combat to speak of. Teräs Käsi changes all that, granting users the ability to overwhelm a Force-sensitive opponent, and take even them by surprise.

The martial art gained its highest level of notoriety thanks to a fighting video game released for the PlayStation, but even now, actually seeing the fighting in motion is hard to come by. Which is probably why Qi’ra practice takes place… off-screen.

1 DANCING GODDESS OF THE GODOAN

Fans of the original Star Wars Comic series are in luck as well, with the actors of Solo actually interacting with one prop pulled directly out of the comics. The comic in question is Star Wars #99, “Touch of the Goddess.” The prop is the prized statue dubbed the Dancing Goddess, sacred and lifesaving for the aliens of Godo.

The story reveals that the Godoans practice a faith that makes their worship of sacred statues necessary for the survival of their race. So when the statues go missing, they’re not surprised to see an illness ravage their entire people. Eventually, Han realizes that the statues and their temple are a type of machine designed to make their world habitable. And the statue of the Dancing Goddess, a green sculpture roughly in the shape of a dancing figure, is a prized artifact current in the collection of one Lando Calrissian.

The Dancing Goddess can be seen in Dryden Vos’s room, slightly different from the comics, but made of the same green glass. The best glimpse comes in the final fight, when it’s smashed in the commotion… the Godoans will be remembered fondly.

(C)

#film #Lifestyle #Solo #star wars

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jeroldlockettus · 6 years

Text

The Invisible Paw

What if we’re not the only economic animals? (Photo: Creative Commons)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “The Invisible Paw.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

Humans, it has long been thought, are the only animal to engage in economic activity. But what if we’ve had it exactly backward?

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. Below is a new episode, one of my favorites in quite some time. It’s about what sets humans apart from other animals, and whether other animals engage in what we’d recognize as economic activity. This is the kind of ridiculous, wonderful question that we get to ask on this show, over and again — in large part thanks to you. You are why we make this show. And, to some degree, you are how we make the show. Our producing partner is WNYC, a public-radio station here in New York, and listener donations are a significant part of the public-radio business model. They help pay for the research, production, studio time, music licensing, mixing, distribution, and so forth. On average, at least five people work on a given episode; sometimes, it’s as many as eight. Your donations help fund all that. So please, if you feel this show is worth something to you, send along some money. It’s very easy, just click here. Hopefully you’ll sign up to become a sustaining member with WNYC. That takes just an $8-a-month donation. And yes, there is swag to be had — Freakonomics Radio shirts, mugs, even golf balls, stuff you can only get by contributing. You’ll be joining the thousands of other smart and decent people who already decided to support a podcast they enjoy. So please join the Freakonomics Radio team, become a member.

* * *

Here’s a question: what is the one thing that sets humans apart from all other animals?

Bill DIAMOND: I believe it is our curiosity, and specifically the curiosity of the why and the how, that is the essence of our humanity and separates us from all other species on this planet.

That’s Bill Diamond. He’s president of the SETI institute — that stands for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

DIAMOND: Other animal species may exhibit the curiosity of the “what.” As in, “What was that noise? What do I see or smell? Is it a threat or is it a meal?” And we all know that curiosity may kill the cat, but our curiosity — to understand the how and the why — drives humans to learn, to explore, to discover, and invent. All of which contribute to our success as a species, perhaps sometimes to a fault.

Anthony APPIAH: Well, I think the thing that distinguishes humans from animals, most obviously, is language.

And that is Anthony Appiah, who teaches philosophy at N.Y.U.

APPIAH: Language is what makes possible the accumulation of culture, it makes possible the very complex forms of social collaboration that human beings do which no other organism does with such flexibility. And it’s why we’re just not like any other animal on the planet.

What does Appiah think that other animals — dogs, maybe — would say if they could speak?

APPIAH: There’s a famous remark of Wittgenstein’s to the effect of, “If lions could speak, we wouldn’t understand them.” And I’m not entirely sure what he had in mind. The main difference a dog’s speech would make to dogs is that they could talk to each other and then they could collaborate in ways that they can’t now. They could say, “I’ll meet you in five minutes at the sheep pen” and stuff like that. And then they could accumulate knowledge and share it through the generations and acquire more complicated doggie packages of ideas. So yeah, it would make a huge difference, and we’d have to be much more careful in our relations with dogs.

CHEN: My name is Keith Chen and I’m a behavioral economist and a professor at the business school at U.C.L.A.

DUBNER: So Keith, if I were to ask you as an economist, what’s the one thing that makes humans human, what would you say?

CHEN: Oh my gosh. I mean as an economist, I would say, you know, co-operative trade. The ability to form complex social structures that allow the emergence of things like cooperation and effective economies. That strikes me as by far one of our most interesting differences from animals.

DUBNER: So I can see why you’d say that. I think of one of the most famous quotes in economic history, from Adam Smith, who once wrote, “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal, by its gestures and natural cries, signify to another, ‘This is mine, that yours. I am willing to give this for that.’” But, you yourself — you’re the economist, that I know of at least, who’s actually done experiments with animals — capuchin monkeys, particularly, and tamarin monkeys — that seems to show that Smith was, to a large degree — I don’t know if I should call him wrong — but doesn’t it seem like he was kind of wrong?

CHEN: Yeah, so Smith was definitely wrong. Okay, maybe we could defend Smith and say he really meant just dogs specifically.

Keith Chen’s answer about what makes us human isn’t all that surprising. Indeed, we sometimes call ourselves homo economicus because of our ability to trade, to create markets, to respond rationally to supply and demand. But: what if we have that whole idea… kind of backwards?

* * *

The U.C.L.A. economist Keith Chen did his monkey research back when he was a graduate student at Harvard and then while teaching at Yale.

CHEN: Yeah that’s absolutely right.

DUBNER: We should say, the monkeys that you’ve done work with, capuchins and tamarins, they’re way down the tree from us, in terms of intelligence, yes?

CHEN: Well, so I should be a little careful, right — so primatologists will tell you that what we know about monkey intelligence is very multifaceted. But the monkeys I worked with, they’re so-called New World monkeys, meaning they’re found in North and South America. They are more distantly related from us than the whole group of what we call Old World monkeys, monkeys that are found in Africa and Asia. And in general they’re less intelligent than Old World monkeys.

DUBNER: I love that you don’t want to insult their intelligence, that’s how much you care about them.

CHEN: Well, they might take it personally.

DUBNER: Of course. They are smart enough to take it personally if you call them dumb.

CHEN: Exactly.

The first monkey experiments Chen worked on, with the primatologist Marc Hauser, explored the ideas of reciprocity and altruism. The researchers would put two tamarins in separate cages, where they could see each other.

CHEN: We set up situations where one tamarin could pull a lever and it would drop a marshmallow into your world. Monkey A pulls the lever and it drops just a marshmallow into your world. And then the question is later, are you nice to this monkey?

“Niceness” was measured by whether Monkey B would reciprocate by pulling its lever to give Monkey A a marshmallow. Often, they did: about 40 percent of the time. This compared to just 7 percent of the time for a monkey who hadn’t given his partner a marshmallow. The takeaway, for tamarins, was this: you do something nice for me, I’ll do something nice for you. You do nothing for me? I’ll pass.

CHEN: Situation two is, monkey pulls a lever, it drops a marshmallow into your world and a marshmallow into his world. So it looks like he’s being nice to you, but only as kind of a byproduct of doing himself this favor.

And what happens when Monkey B sees his marshmallow as a mere byproduct of Monkey A’s self-interest? In this case, Monkey B reciprocates only three percent of the time — even less than if Monkey A hadn’t given him a marshmallow at all.

CHEN: Like a true altruist versus an accidental altruist, monkeys are smart enough to distinguish.

DUBNER: And did that surprise you, that distinction?

CHEN: Oh my gosh. Yeah, absolutely.

This distinction was surprising because it looks an awful lot like what humans do while making economic decisions.

John LIST: So I do experiments on politicians, on C.E.O.’s, on car salesmen, on school teachers and school kids.

That’s John List from the University of Chicago. He’s one of the foremost practitioners of economic experiments on humans.

LIST: And where I start, is I say, “What are the fundamental building blocks from economics that we can test to see if these people conform to economic theories?” And the thing that you’d point to is the law of demand. It says, “I’ll buy less if I face higher prices.” It almost seems absurdly obvious. So when I do experiments like that — when I increase price — what happens in the markets? Nearly every time — politician, C.E.O., school teacher — they will always conform to that particular law. Three-, four-, five-year-olds conform to that law.

DUBNER: And would you say that’s maybe the one law in economics that is actually a law? I guess what I really want to know is, is it the truest law of economics laws?

LIST: Exactly. I think that the truest law of economics laws would be the law of demand.

DUBNER: Now, would it surprise you if animals, if non-human animals responded to that law less consistently than human animals? I guess that would surprise you, right? Because they’re not as brilliant as us.

LIST: Yeah, I think that if you talk about rationality and reasoning being important in satisfying this particular law, then I would say insomuch as those are important, we should find more violations of that law than what we find amongst humans. That’s correct.

In other words, those not-very-brilliant New World monkeys that Keith Chen was working with, you’d assume they would not respond to the law of demand like we do. But Chen wanted to find out for sure. First, he would have to teach a bunch of capuchin monkeys to use money.

CHEN: You know, that took a long time.

As money, he used metal washers, the kind you get at a hardware store.

CHEN: So some monkeys never get it. Some monkeys — I mean, we gave up after about half a year of trying to teach them to patiently pick up a washer and then hand it to an experimenter who would then trade it for food. These tended to be younger monkeys that would never get the task. But no monkey picked it up immediately. It was very artificial to them, this kind of physical trade.

DUBNER: But once some monkeys did learn how to use money and buy different food and make choices, basically, you were able to produce what we would recognize as economic research. Yes?

CHEN: Absolutely. So, once they understood the concept of money and once they started to use it fluently, all of a sudden it felt like a lot of other components of economic activity suddenly became unlocked, like they suddenly seem very natural at responding to price changes. So, yesterday apple slices only cost a coin, today they’re on sale and one coin will buy me two apple slices. They immediately got that and respond in ways that look incredibly, textbook, economically rational.

DUBNER: Yeah, so what you just described is, I guess, you’d call it a price shock, right? Would you say that the capuchin monkeys responded worse, as well, or better than the average human in responding to a price shock?

CHEN: Well, we conducted this relatively technical test, but it’s called GARP in economic lingo, the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference. Economists think of GARP as basically the test which asks, “Are humans responding in a rational way to prices?” We don’t want to call people irrational just because they like peanut butter more than jelly, or if they like jelly more than peanut butter. But GARP basically says, regardless of how you feel about peanut butter and jelly, you should eat more jelly if we double the price of peanut butter. And it puts bounds on behavior, which we’ll call rational responses to price shocks. And when we test the capuchin monkeys on this basic rational response to price shocks, they pass GARP as well as any human beings that you can test. In fact, it’s not until about age 10 or 11 that humans even start to pass GARP at this basic level that we observe the capuchin monkeys passing it at.

Okay, so capuchin monkeys seem to understand price shocks, and the law of demand, pretty well. On that dimension, they’re looking fairly human. But what about some other dimensions that make us human? Like some of the quirks and biases we exhibit when making decisions? Chen wondered whether those parallels would hold up as you went down the evolutionary ladder.

CHEN: We tested this long-standing economic puzzle, which is called the endowment effect.

DUBNER: Where you give some students a coffee mug and others a pen, and ask them to trade, is that the idea?

CHEN: Exactly. So, in Econ 101 classes around the country in their first year, half of econ students are handed mugs and half are handed pens, and the economically rational thing is for half of all students to request a trade. Basically, you either like a pen more or you like a mug more, and you get a 50 percent chance of getting what you liked more. So about half of students should trade for the other thing. And then what we typically observe is only about somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of students trade, instead of the economically rational 50. And that’s exactly what we saw with capuchin monkeys as well. We find they look just like countless experiments that you run with Econ 101 students in large lecture halls.

DUBNER: Even though we think of the endowment effect as economic language now, just describe what you think is the sort of psychological formation that results in our wanting to keep what is ours.

CHEN: Yeah, that’s something called loss aversion. Loss aversion is this basic idea that once you have something, it feels more painful to give it up than it would have felt good to acquire it in the first place. So quite robustly, students act as if it hurts two and a half times more to be asked to give up the mug than it felt good to be given the mug in the first place. It’s almost as if just instantaneously, this sense of ownership makes it a painful loss to give up the mug, as opposed to a smaller gain to acquire it in the first place. And what that does is, it basically suppresses trade. It means that we don’t see nearly as much economic activity as we see between humans.

So Keith Chen found that capuchin monkeys, once they were taught to use money, behaved rationally, like we do, when it comes to price theory; and irrationally — like we do — when it comes to the endowment effect.

CHEN: We were surprised every month, like every month we would just be flabbergasted again at how sophisticated our monkeys looked. Specifically, at economic activity. But also, the subtle ways in which they looked irrational and they looked emotional, in exactly the same ways that people do.

Maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised that other primates behave like us in these ways. We do share more genetic material with them than other animals. That’s something pointed out by the renowned primatologist Frans de Waal, when we asked him what makes humans human.

Frans DE WAAL: I’ve been doing this for a long time, like 40 years. And the question, whether humans are different and how they are different, is for me a sort of weird question, because for me humans are primates. So they’re not fundamentally different. Darwin of course said that we descend from the apes, but I think he didn’t go far enough. We are basically apes — there’s no good reason to distinguish us from apes. And there are taxonomists who have argued that we should not even have a special genus — we are just part of chimpanzees and bonobos because in terms of DNA, we are 98.5% identical. In every respect I consider human intelligence and cognition a variation on animal intelligence and cognition. I don’t see it as fundamentally different.

Okay, I see de Waal’s point. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that other primates engage in what looks like the economic activity we engage in. But still, let’s remember: Keith Chen’s experiments happened in a lab, after he and his colleagues had painstakingly taught the monkeys to use money. You don’t see capuchins setting up banks and stock exchanges in the wild. And you certainly wouldn’t expect to see economic activity in animals further down the chain, like fish — would you?

Ronald NOË: I said, “Well! If that works, I’ll eat my hat.”

Over the past few decades, an idea has been percolating through the field of biology: that economic activity may be happening in the wild. We’ll hear about that after the break. But first, here’s the Princeton sociologist Dalton Conley, when we asked him what makes humans different from all the rest:

Dalton CONLEY: The answer is: absolutely nothing. One by one, the supposed attributes that we had thought were unique to humans have been shown to be present in other species. Crows use tools. Elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror. Whales form social networks of the same size and complexity as we do. Penguins mourn their dead. Gibbons are monogamous. Bonobos are polyamorous. Ducks rape. Chimpanzees deploy slaves. Velvet spiders commit suicide. Dolphins have language. And the quicker we get over the Judeo-Christian notion that we are somehow qualitatively different from the rest of the biome, the quicker we will learn to live healthier lives for ourselves and for the planet.

* * *

We’ve been asking people what is the one thing that distinguishes humans from other animals.

Jonathan SACKS: In a sentence, the one thing that makes humans human is our ability to think in the future tense.

And that is…

SACKS: Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of Britain and the Commonwealth, currently a university teacher, author, thinker.

“Thinking in the future tense”: I like that notion. Not sure I buy it entirely. Squirrels gather nuts for the winter. Is the median squirrel really worse at saving for the future than the median human? In fact, many of the distinguishing marks of humanity we’ve been hearing today are — well, arguable. Especially this one:

CHEN: I mean, as an economist, I would say co-operative trade.

That, again, is the economist Keith Chen, whose own research suggests that monkeys, at least, do quite resemble humans when it comes to matters of trade. But, as we’ve noted: monkeys are, genetically, pretty close to humans. And, further, those were nice, tight lab experiments in which Chen spent many months teaching the monkeys how to use money. What if we were to take this question of animal economics out of the lab, and into nature?

CRAIR: My name is Ben Crair and I’m a journalist living in Berlin. I write mainly about science and wildlife.

Crair wrote a fascinating article for Bloomberg called “The Secret Economic Lives of Animals.” We started our conversation with the question we’ve been asking everyone else today:

DUBNER: So, as someone who’s written about animals a lot, and who is a human animal yourself, what would you say is the one thing that makes humans different from all other animals?

CRAIR: Ah, such a hard question. I think a lot of biologists would say that we do have a lot in common with animals, so that it’s not really clear where to draw this line. Understanding ourselves as animals provides us probably a way to understand other animals as well. So I think these lines are actually getting harder to define, that what is animal and what is human. It used to seem more distinct.

DUBNER: Getting harder because we’re learning more about animal behavior?

CRAIR: Yeah. And human behavior as well. And just, what is intelligence, what produces intelligence in animals, and finding it in unexpected places, in animals — things like octopuses that are so distant from us evolutionarily, but that exhibit behaviors that we would categorize as extremely intelligent.

Ben Crair’s pursuit of animal economics began where many great stories begin: in the footnotes.

CRAIR: I was researching something else. And I saw a reference to “biological market theory,” and it struck me as a contradiction or an oxymoron, a biological market, because a market is a realm of economic activity and only humans engage in economic activity, I thought. So I followed the footnotes back, it led me to —

NOË: I’m Ronald Noë —

CRAIR: Ronald Noë.

NOË: I’m a professor here at the University of Strasbourg, in France.

DUBNER: And are you technically a biologist or some other kind of -ist?

NOË: I’m a pure biologist, yeah. I’m a primatologist, to be more exact.

DUBNER: Talk to me about why you began to study animal behavior, and how you got started.

NOË: I’m afraid I have to say that as many young biologists, you’re just attracted to animals because they are fun to look at. And I was attracted to mammals because they are nice and hairy and whatever. It’s still the reason that most of my students ask me to do primates. If you ask them then, “Why? What are your questions?” they go silent. And actually they want adventure, they want Africa, they want nice animals. And I must admit that was my basic reason as well as a young boy. As soon as you get into the university, of course, you’re confronted with the fact that you need to ask real questions.

The real questions Noë had were about cooperation in primates. He got his start as a grad student — under Frans de Waal, in fact — observing chimpanzees at the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands. By the early 1980’s, Noë was observing baboons, in the wild, in Kenya. In these baboon groups, alpha males had access to females, and kept the lower-ranking males away. But Noë found that lower-ranking males could band together to challenge the alphas.

NOË: And if you are successful at that, then you have a certain time-exclusive access to that female. It’s called the consortship. And the low-ranking males only have a chance if they cooperate together and chase the high-ranking male away from that female.

But there’s a dilemma. If two low-ranking males worked together to steal a female from an alpha, only one of them could mate with the female.

NOË: You can’t split a female in two.

So how was the decision made? How could this cooperation work? At the time, there were in biology circles two primary theories of cooperation. One was “kin selection,” which involves helping out a closely related individual to make it more likely for your own genes to be passed on. But the baboons Noë was observing weren’t that closely related. The other theory was called “reciprocal altruism”: you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Kind of like the marshmallow monkeys that Keith Chen had studied. According to this theory, the lower-ranking males should alternate who gets access to the female after they’ve chased away the alpha male.

NOË: If you don’t alternate, then the one that did not have the female often enough should walk away from it — should not accept that.

CRAIR: Noë was observing three baboons.

Ben Crair again.

CRAIR: They were all low-ranking, but the most powerful one was named Stu. He was the best partner. And what he realized was that when Stu and one of the other baboons successfully challenged a higher-ranking male and drove him off, and then had the opportunity to mate with a female, Stu was getting most of the mating time. They weren’t sharing it 50-50.

NOË: And the other males still formed coalitions with him. And that started me thinking about, how the heck is this possible?

Noë realized that reciprocal altruism could not explain the behavior he was seeing. It had to be something else.

CRAIR: And as Noë observed them more closely, what he realized, Stu was a really clever animal. Stu was more valuable to each of those baboons than they were to each other, because they weren’t as strong. And Stu realized that he could basically get more mating time after a successful challenge, because if the guy he was with tried to say, “Well, I want 50-50,” Stu would just leave him and then go work with the other one, and that one would probably be happier to accept, maybe, 30 percent of the time with Stu, than not have Stu at all. And so what Noë realized is that there was this element of partner choice going on.

Partner choice. That was Ronald Noë’s big idea. Stu could choose between partners, effectively bargaining to raise the price of his cooperation. And with that insight, Noë realized that what he was observing was an economic transaction.

NOË: Partner choice is what drives markets, what drives trade, what drives everything, because you force the others to outbid in competition. And that’s basically what a market is.

When Noë published his research in the early 1990’s, he called this situation a “biological market.”

CRAIR: It was essentially one of the first times biologists have really tried to apply economic ideas to nature.

The idea didn’t go over so well with biologists or the big biology journals.

NOË: We of course send it to Nature and then, Nature didn’t want to have it.

Biologists didn’t think economics had much to say about their field. And economists didn’t want to hear from a biologist, either.

NOË: In the usual slightly arrogant way of economists, they say, “Well, we knew all this and we have all these models before.”

But over time, Noë’s biological-market idea gained some traction.

CRAIR: If you go back to just this question of why does cooperation exist in nature, I think that this theory has been accepted as a really credible and correct explanation for why that is.

NOË: It picked up very slowly. These days it’s cited much more per year than it was in the early five, six years.

One of the biologists who picked up the idea, and extended it way beyond primates, was a student of Noë’s.

BSHARY: My name is Redouan Bshary, I am a professor in behavioral ecology. That means I study animal behavior.

Bshary teaches at the University of Neuchatel, in Switzerland. He started out doing fieldwork, in Africa, with Ronald Noë. And Bshary was good. Really good.

NOË: He proposed to do experiments in the field, which is very difficult in the forest…

BSHARY: So I bought a leopard cloth to wrap around my body and approach monkeys and see how they respond…

NOË: And I said, “Well, if that works, I’ll eat my hat!”

BSHARY: …and who gives alarm calls first, because I was studying mixed-species associations.

NOË: And he actually did it, and he pulled it off.

DUBNER: So if I have it right, you’re essentially climbing into trees wearing a kind of leopard-skin coat?

BSHARY: No. So I was — a leopard is approaching over the forest floor. So I was stalking the monkeys. So they are red colobus monkeys and Diana monkeys. They are not particularly famous for non-primatologists because they just occur in primary rainforests in Africa. They are difficult to observe, and that’s why there are not that many people studying them.

But Bshary decided he did not want to spend his career wrapped up in a leopard skin in the hot jungle.

NOË: He had come into contact with somebody in our lab who worked in the Red Sea on fish.

And Bshary thought, “Hey, maybe scuba diving would be better than jungle-stalking.”

BSHARY: I really learned diving because of the project.

He camped out by the Red Sea, in Egypt, for a couple of months.

BSHARY: I lived in the middle of nowhere in a tent, with a little straw roof above for protection against the sun. No fridge, so quite vegan-eating, apart from once a week we go to the next village and there — that was probably the only time in my life that I really enjoyed to go to McDonalds.

Once Bshary learned how to dive, and started working on the coral reef, he discovered that this habitat was ideal for studying animal behavior.

BSHARY: The nice thing about a coral reef is that predator and prey, they live so close together, that if you are there as a human, the fish don’t really care about you. So you’re immediately part of it. Whereas if you go studying monkeys in a rainforest — first of all, you spend one year habituating the monkeys to your presence. Before, they hide from you. And once they are used to you, they are still 20 meters up in the trees, in the canopy. So it’s very difficult to observe anything in a rain forest. Whereas it’s extremely easy in a coral reef.

One little fish captured Bshary’s attention. It’s called a cleaner wrasse.

BSHARY: So the cleaner wrasse is a small fish, 10 centimeters max, that lives from the Red Sea to Australia and the whole Indo-Pacific.

This particular wrasse is called a “cleaner” because of the rather unusual niche it fills on the coral reef.

CRAIR: These are the fish that essentially eat the parasites and dead scales off of other fish.

BSHARY: Little crustaceans or little flatworms that would eat either the mucus or the skin or the blood of the clients. That’s, obviously, like a tick, and you don’t want to swim around with ticks, so you go to a cleaner fish, and the cleaner fish then removes these parasites.

Each cleaner wrasse sets up shop at a particular spot on the reef — kind of like a string of car washes — and the client fish line up at their favorite station to have their parasites removed.

BSHARY: That’s their reason of being, so to speak, in a coral reef. From sunrise to sunset, 11 hours, they clean. They have 2,000 interactions per day. And a single client typically goes five to 30 times a day to see a cleaner fish.

The cleaner wrasse will even service predators, like the barracuda.

CRAIR: One of the scariest looking fishes in the ocean, it’s got a crocodile mouth, needle-sharp teeth. And the cleaner wrasse go in its mouth and eat the parasites from between its teeth.

So Redouan Bshary was hanging out, underwater at the coral reef, watching all this cleaner wrasse action. He began to observe patterns. For one thing, there were two different types of client fish. There were the fish with limited range, who had access to just one cleaner wrasse. Bshary called these fish “residents.” He compares them to people who live out in the country.

BSHARY: You live in a little village, there’s one hairdresser, if you want to have your hair cut, you go to this one hairdresser or you don’t have your hair cut at all.

And then there were the fish with more range, who had their pick of many cleaning stations. If they didn’t like the service they got at one, they could choose another. These fish, Bshary called “visitors.”

BSHARY: So this is like the big city life.

In other words, if you don’t like one hairdresser, you can find another one nearby. And the cleaner fish know the difference between visitors and residents.

CRAIR: What’s incredible here is the cleaner wrasses themselves are able to recognize and understand which species of fishes have other options. And they will actually tailor their level of service depending on the competition.

For instance, they might make a resident fish wait while they service a visitor, knowing that a visitor might take his business elsewhere if there’s a line.

BSHARY: And that’s exactly what visitors are doing. If the service is good, there’s a higher chance that you go back to the same station for your next inspection. If the service is lousy, you go to a different station for your next inspection.

CRAIR: They also provide another service too, which is, they use their fins to basically massage the fish they’re servicing. And the predators receive way more tactile stimulation from the cleaner wrasses than the non-predators, and the residents receive much less.

This was exactly what Bshary had been looking for. The client fish were choosing their partners, and the cleaner fish were dialing their service up or down in response to the amount of choice that each client had. And, as economic theory would predict, the client fish with more choice reaped greater benefits.

BSHARY: Obviously, I was extremely excited. I was hoping for this market effect.

But there’s a central tension between cleaner wrasses and their clients. Eating parasites and dead scales is all well and good, but that is not what the cleaner wrasse truly wants.

CRAIR: It actually prefers to take a bite of healthy scales, or healthy mucus.

BSHARY: This mucus, this is what makes the fish so slimy.

CRAIR: It tastes better, it’s probably more nutritious.

BSHARY: That’s actually quite nutritious. The mucus protects the skin and the scales of the fish.

CRAIR: But if it does that, it hurts the fish. The fish will probably swim away.

BSHARY: So the client obviously has no interest whatsoever that the cleaner fish eats the mucus. And so there’s this conflict of interest. The cleaner fish wants to eat mucus, the client wants the cleaner fish to eat parasites, and therefore the clients have to find means to make the cleaner fish eat against its preference.

So what happens? Bshary found that the cleaner wrasse is much more likely to cheat, and take mucus from a resident fish — the kind that can’t just move his business to another cleaner.

CRAIR: It’s like monopoly power, they can extract a higher price. Whereas in a more open market where the fish can travel and shop, they have to raise the quality of service, so they are more gentle.

Here’s something else Bshary found: if the supply of cleaner wrasses in a given area decreased, the remaining cleaners had more leverage.

CRAIR: So, when Bshary would manipulate conditions in the reef, if he just took half of the wrasses out of the reef, the ones that remained immediately started taking more bites from their clients.

But the clients do have recourse. If a cleaner wrasse takes too big of a bite, the client will chase the cleaner fish away.

BSHARY: And the cleaner fish will remember that this particular client chased it, and when this particular client comes back 20 minutes later, half an hour later, the cleaner fish will remember, “Okay, here my relationship with this client is not particularly good. So I have to make up for the bad service last time.” And the cleaner fish will give this resident a particularly good service.

DUBNER: And there’s no doubt in your mind that they really do remember the individual fish?

BSHARY: Yeah, we did experiments on this, yeah.

Redouan Bshary has by now spent two decades studying the cleaner wrasse. Long enough to convince him, and his fellow animal behaviorists, that they plainly engage in what humans would recognize as economic transactions. And there’s growing evidence that biological markets exist across a very wide range of animals. Paper wasps, for instance. They live in nests that are controlled by a single queen, and they earn their keep by foraging for food. But: they’re free to go work in another nest if they’d like. The journalist Ben Crair again:

CRAIR: Its labor is sort of the price it pays to get into a nest. If you suddenly double the number of nests, the price should go down.

And that’s exactly what researchers found. When the number of nests in a given area rose, the worker wasps could get away with foraging less.

CRAIR: The dominant breeders were suddenly willing to tolerate smaller contributions, in terms of the amount of time the subordinates were spending in the field foraging.

DUBNER: So it’s like, when the unemployment rate goes down, wages go up?

CRAIR: I’ve thought about it more in terms of a real-estate market. So when there’s a larger supply of homes available on the market, the price of rent is cheaper. And when that supply is really restricted, the price of rent goes up.

Perhaps the purest biological market, at least according to Ben Crair, lies outside the animal kingdom.

CRAIR: There are underground markets between the roots of plants and fungi.

As you may remember from high school: fungi are really good at harvesting nutrients from the soil, like nitrogen and phosphorus; while plants are good at turning sunlight and carbon dioxide into sugar molecules.

NOË: So both parties give some molecules that the other needs.

That again is the biologist Ronald Noë.

NOË: Those markets are in fact nutrient-exchange markets.

A fungus-to-plant nutrient exchange is, of course, pretty far from what we humans think of as markets. There is no cognition going on there, or at least what we think of as cognition. Doesn’t trade require an intention to trade? And what about all the emotions that accompany intention? Perhaps, but: for Ronald Noë, that is what makes biological markets more rational than human ones.

NOË: Homo economicus I don’t think exists really in humans because they are not that rational. But natural selection can of course end up with, after many many generations and a lot of selection, you can end up with an organism that is doing things that look very rational. It’s not using reason, of course, it’s using innate mechanisms but it is programmed to do things that look very rational. Let’s put it that way.

DUBNER: That’s so interesting. So as I’m sure you well know, Richard Thaler won the Nobel in economics for essentially arguing that Homo economicus is greatly overrated. You’re saying that Homo economicus is really— that the idea of that is probably more fully present in other animals, other than humans then, yeah?

NOË: Yeah you should leave out the “Homo” part and you’re okay. I think the less you use cognitive mechanisms, the least brain you have, if you have no neurons you have a better chance of being very rational in your behavior and then when you use them. When you use your brain, you can make all kinds of mistakes.

DUBNER: What you just said is a summary of what’s attracted me to economics and behavioral economics these last 20 years. Because the anomalies, or the holes in the rational theory has been pointed out. But when you say it like that, it kind of blows me away because you’re basically saying that the more we think, the more capacity we have for cognitive activity or decision-making, the more likely we are to be less rational. Yeah?

NOË: There is of course a big advantage of using a brain for all kinds of solutions. You’re very plastic, you can react to all kinds of novel situations. And things without brains, like bacteria, fungi, or whatever, cannot react instantly to all kinds of different situations. They are well selected to act in a certain environment. If they are in that environment however, then they are very good at it. They are selected to do exactly the right thing — in thousands to millions of generations — to do the right thing in the right moment. In that respect, if you look at that and you would say, “Well, how would a human react in the same kind of situation in the most rational way?” He would do exactly the same as that fungus or bacteria.

Thinking about Ronald Noë’s argument for the intense rationality of biological markets, I went back to Keith Chen, the economist. In light of the biological evidence, I wanted to take one more run at his answer about what sets us apart from other animals.

DUBNER: You know obviously, they don’t do as much as we do. They don’t drive cars, they don’t write down math, and so on. And how much of it was an exhibition of human triumphalism or species superiority, that you just assumed that because we’re the humans and they’re the animals, there’s this whole set of economic-like activity that of course they are not going to be able to do. How much of it was that, you think?

CHEN: I guess it would be natural to think that animals can’t engage in very rich economic activity, because you just look out at the animal kingdom and you just typically don’t see very rich economic activity, right? But you know, when you start to actually test those assumptions by bringing animals into the laboratory and just try and create the conditions for them to learn economic trade and subtle aspects of reputation maintenance and cheater detection and cheating punishment, is that it doesn’t take very much — that adding just very thin layers of institutions for trust, adding very thin layers which allow the emergence of abstract money, just immediately engender very, very rich economic activity, even among monkeys.

DUBNER: And so when I asked you at the beginning, what is it that makes us human, makes humans human, your answer was basically trade. But you’ve spent a lot of your economic research life disproving your very argument. Haven’t you?

CHEN: You’re giving me a hard time here. I think that’s right. I feel like I have an endowment effect towards my earlier answer, and it’s going to feel painful to give up on it. But absolutely.

“Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.” That was Adam Smith’s contention. I think we can all agree that, if this sentiment isn’t outright wrong, it’s certainly not quite right. And, since Smith was picking on dogs specifically, we’ll give the last word today to one of my very favorite dog experts. Again, on the question of what sets humans apart.

Alexandra HOROWITZ: I’m Alexandra Horowitz. I’m a researcher and professor at Barnard College where I run the Dog Cognition Lab. We study the sensory and cognitive abilities of dogs with my aim to be to understand what it might be like to be a dog.

Horowitz has written a couple of fascinating books: Inside of a Dog and Being a Dog.

HOROWITZ: I’ve studied and taught animal cognition and comparative psychology for decades. And this question, “What’s the one thing that distinguishes humans from non-human animals?” is clearly the driving force of much research. We might trace it back to Plato, who described man as a featherless biped. But the smart-alec Diogenes then plucked a chicken and said triumphantly, “Here is Plato’s man.” To which Plato simply pivoted, adding, “Okay, a featherless biped with broad nails, not claws.” And so it has been since, trying to find the feature that will verify the human species’ uniqueness. “It’s imitation.” “It’s culture.” “It’s teaching.” “It’s language.” “It’s a theory of mind.” Each confidently proposed and then collapsing under the weight of actual evidence.

The one thing that makes humans human? Our obsession with asking and answering this question. As far as I know we’re the only species so concerned with distinguishing ourselves from other animals. Of course, research could prove me wrong.

Touché, Alexandra Horowitz. And thank you.

Also, please remember that if you’d like to donate to the production budget of this podcast, we would love to have you. Just click here.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica and Brian Gutierrez. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalsky, Stephanie Tam, Harry Huggins and Andy Meisenheimer. For this episode, the sound design is by David Herman, with help from Dan Dzula. The music throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, or via email at [email protected].

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode: SOURCES

Anthony Appiah, philosophy and law professor at New York University.

Redouan Bshary, behavioral ecology professor at the University of Neuchatel.

Keith Chen, economics professor at U.C.L.A.

Dalton Conley, sociology professor at Princeton University.

Ben Crair, journalist.

Frans de Waal, primatologist and psychology professor at Emory University.

Bill Diamond, president and C.E.O. of the SETI institute.

Alexandra Horowitz, professor at Barnard College.

John List, economics professor at the University of Chicago.

Ronald Noë, psychology professor at the University of Strasbourg.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth.

RESOURCES

“The Secret Economic Lives of Animals,” by Ben Crair (Bloomberg, August 2017).

“Market Forces Influence Helping Behavior in Cooperatively Breeding Paper Wasps,” by Lena Grinsted and Jeremy Field (Nature Communications, January 2017).

“How Basic Are Behavioral Biases? Evidence from Capuchin Monkey Trading Behavior,” by Keith Chen, Venkat Lakshminarayanan, and Laurie Santos (Journal of Political Economy, 2006).

“Give Unto Others: Genetically Unrelated Cotton-Top Tamarin Monkeys Preferentially Give Food to Those Who Altruistically Give Food Back,” by Marc Hauser, Keith Chen, Frances Chen, and Emmeline Chuang (The Royal Society, September 2003).

“Cleaner Fish Labroides Dimidiatus Recognise Familiar Clients,” by Sabine Tebbich, Redouan Bshary, and Alexandra Grutter (Animal Cognition, September 2002).

“Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias,” by Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, and Richard Thaler (Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1991).

“The Market Effect: an Explanation for Pay-off Asymmetries among Collaborating Animals,” by Ronald Noë, Carel van Schaik, and Jan van Hooff (Ethology, 1991).

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