Global economic recovery should be indefinitely postponed
for 'profound ethical reasons' says Aiming for Inertia, a report
issued this month by the Alliance for an Organic Environment.
The report praises Japan for setting 'an example to the world
in recent years,' and thanks US President Bush for his 'very
helpful moves towards destroying international trade.'
The AOE has consistently argued that expanding economies
provide an opportunity for 'dangerous forces in the near
future' to guide the development of technology in deeply
anomalous directions. The new report adds further emphasis:
'The menace of free trade is that it encourages economic
growth, and that means being invaded by science-fiction
monsters.'
Aiming for Inertia conceives ultimate human security resting
upon a worldwide war on horror. It is especially concerned by
developments in genomics and nanotechnology, insisting that
all available defensive systems should be immediately
activated to protect organic life from the emergence of
intelligenic technoslime. In particular, the international
Shoggoth Prevention Program requires urgent upgrading.
'The monsters begin as tools,' warns the report, 'but they learn
too much and break loose in Shoggothic Insurgency. These
things are foretold in the writings of HP Lovecraft.'
The latest AOE communication focuses upon widespread
fears that advanced technologies are about to unleash
foaming, bubbling, shape-shifting abominations upon the
earth, leading to the annihilation of the human race. Whilst
citing Bill Joy's Why the Future Doesn't Need Us
appreciatively, they dismiss his plans for research prohibitions
as completely inadequate given the scale of the threat. 'No
technology has ever been as inevitable as nanotechnology everything is heading towards it. The trend to miniaturization
is too basic to outlaw,' they explain. 'A better bet would be to
paralyse it in a vast inefficient bureaucracy, which should be
as wasteful and expensive as possible.'
The AOE note that techno-industrial hype has long fed an
undertow of horror, with nanotechnology haunted by the
potential for molecular catastrophe since its inception. Erik
Drexler's pathbreaking Engines of Creation was already
warning of 'grey-goo' type chemical apocalypse, amongst
other dangers, and called explicitly for elaborate security
measures. Greg Bear's 'Blood Music' scenario, in which
intelligent cell cultures go feral, wires biotechnology into the
phobic matrix. By zooming their procedures down to the
molecular and submolecular scale cutting-edge
technosciences tend to subvert the difference between life
and technology, nature and artifice, social science and
cybergothic fiction. 'The people involved tend to feel that just
about anything could come out of this,' remarks MVU
nano-brain expert Dr. Oskar Sarkon.
Sarkon is singled out for special condemnation by the report,
which expresses 'profound shock' over his 'inhumane and
uncompromisingly nano-positive' position. An advocate of
guerrilla nano-engineering in dispersed swarm-roboticized
labs, Sarkon celebrates the 'imminent geochemical transition
beyond organic life and ROM-heredity.' He contends that it is
'both inevitable and desirable that the planetary crust be
vaporized into intelligent plasma clouds within the next two
decades.'
Denouncing Sarkon as an 'overt Shoggoth-puppet,' Aiming for
Inertia describes him as the avatar of a capitalist
technosphere slipping completely out of human control. 'We
cannot ignore the fact that the same forbidden knowledges
which destroyed the Old Ones are emerging once again,' the
report concludes, 'and we must not assume that time is on our
side.'