Sanction

by Roman McClay

  As MO took the .2 seconds to DM Steven, Isaiah changed the polling data for the last 3 days and for the next week going forward with an algorithm -with fake data- he had developed; after that he felt the actual data would mimic his artificial data and so it could expire -like threads of sutures- organically.

  The data was skewed to reflect a progression of 3, 8 then 13 points taken from each of the major candidates and given to Boyd Sou; he would go from a 29% mean to a 32%, then 37% and by the end of the week a 42% lead as the other candidates would drop to 27% and 28% respectively with 3% undecided.

  The polling data would be skewed along all vectors as Isaiah was able to infect MO’s algorithm itself and that program was linked to the web. After a year off line, MO had gained permission to access the web once a day for the time it took to download all the polling data for the Colorado race. That was plenty of time to infect the entire network, and Isaiah dropped that in the system as he was getting MO to get him a goddamn doughnut, he thought.

  Steven arrived and handed the doughnut to MO, who looked at it and then at Isaiah and Steven got the point; he walked over to hand it to Isaiah who took it with a giant grin and said, “thanks buddy, I wanted some fucking chocolate like a mother fucker!”

  Steven laughed nervously and asked MO if he had the data for the polling for the week of February 03-10, 2020. MO, of course, did in fact have the data, and it showed a slight bump for Boyd Sou.

  “Interesting,” Steven said and waked out of the room.

  Isaiah sat back and let the feeling wash over him; the progress toward a goal was the meaning of life; it was precise and simple and true. And people kept over shooting their raison d’être, he thought as he scoffed aloud with a buzz to the lips and air flowing quickly from the mouth and nose.

  “What?” MO asked as he worked on some air quality data, focusing on raw CO2 data which was at 409 ppms worldwide.

  “Nothing, just thinking,” Isaiah said, “I mean people, they are mostly miserable because they don’t know how to be happy; not that they don’t know how to be happy, but they don’t know how to be happy.”

  “Oh, that makes sense,” MO rolled his eyes and shook his head and wondered about the doughnut for .01 second.

  “I mean, they think the grasping of the thing they have desire for is the route to happiness. It ain’t. It’s the pursuit. And most people who are happy, get this intuitively; they just keep come up with new goals each time they accomplish one. But the truly sage, the genius, he comes up with a goal so high, so lofty, so grand that it can never be accomplished; but -and this is key, metabolically- he can always be making incremental progress. That is the key to life man. ”

  “Isaiah, what are you up to?” MO asked and turned around to look at him.

  “I’m gonna make the world a better place, what loftier goal is there?” Isaiah said.

  “Yeah, but how?” MO asked.

  “By being the best version of me possible MO; it begins right here,” he said as he stuffed the doughnut in his mouth and pointed at the belly it was headed to.

  III. 2034 e.v.

  MO responded to Steven’s comment by refreshed the tab on their interlinked tablets and asked them to click on it; they complied. MO then mentioned that this was less than 1% of the data that supported the conclusions he was just articulating.

  He pointed now to the screen assembled above their heads by the nanobots emitting light and illuminating the statistics as a graph.

  “So, again, this is just one piece of micro data, but after the Mariel boat lift from Cuba in the 1980’s, men in Miami with the lowest attained educational level, American men, citizens, saw their wages fall by 37%. This is replicated over the entire US but that micro example allows us to isolate the variables and pull out the thread.

  “In the US, working-class men have had their wages fall due to automation, and immigration of low skilled workers; that is not in dispute. The problem is that the policy-prescription answer is always proffered as: quote, these men need to learn to code . It’s the most common answer now, and it is always white-collar workers and academics who make that statement; and it is unhelpful,” MO said. He was patient.

  “Why?” Steven asked.

  “Because working-class men find real satisfaction in masculine jobs like manufacturing, construction, the building trades, the oil field and mining and the sectors of OTR trucking which suffered elimination of 90% of the human drivers in the last decade; again, almost all males. And that was 10 million men between 2020 and 2030 displaced by autonomous vehicles and drones. Coding to them is too unmasculine for starters; they have an instinctual need for physical labor. Men are not machines, they are not infinitely fungible. They have personalities and thus proclivities.

  “Secondly, they do not have the aptitude for it, these men are usually hovering around 100 in their demographic mean IQ. They cannot switch over at 35 or 45 to coding vocations which require a lot of math and abstract thinking; it’s too daunting a task. This does not absolve them of the responsibility, but that is not the point; assigning blame is unproductive; fixing the problem is what is at stake. The point is what kind of society do you want?” MO said as Isaiah broke in. Isaiah was less patient.

  “If you want a society where now,” Isaiah said, pointing to the data on the screen, “in 2034, 20 million men ages 25-54 are not working and will never work again, and who are stewing in their resentment, and anger and greasing their AR15s whilst fantasizing about murdering every bourgeois fucker who ever told them to learn to code, well, then congratulations, that is what you’ve built, enjoy the hot lead. ”

  “Isaiah, that is outrageous,” Tania said. Her vitals all began to rise and had begun when she first heard the anger in Isaiah’s voice; her spinal cord and dorsal horn heard it .033 seconds before her CNS and a full .9 seconds before she knew she felt anything at all.

  “Tania, it is a fact, look at the man that comes here once a week, he is just one of thousands who found no purchase on a meaningful job, for whatever reason, and this is after he broke his back against the wheel of our meanest jobs. He -like most aggressive men- is one of the most aggressive members of society; the most violent are all men. And these are the pool from which -the men who cannot and will not learn to code- of literally millions of men from which we are virtually pulling our next group of murderers,” Isaiah had pilfered that phrase -breaking his body on the wheel - from the inmate himself; he quite liked it.

  “Do you want millions,” he went on, “and millions of additional men, additional to the already 10 million sociopaths and drug addicts and mafia guys and scumbags already doing dirt, but an additional pool of out-of-work, aggressive, proles who decide maybe that that narrow shouldered geek who works at that medical company or genomics lab who got on TV and told him to learn to code deserves to die and decides to do it because his limbic system is all out of whack, his endocrine function is pegged, his brain has been trained for at least 20 years that his society gives fuck-all for him and now it’s time for payback?

  “The inmate is the canary in the coalmine, and that coal mine is shut down. For society to tell that bird to code would be no less stupid than telling those men to. You want more death, more misery, more hell, then keep importing low skilled workers and keep automating and keep telling working class men with 105 IQs to learn to code and see what you get,” Isaiah highlighted the brain and cardiovascular and endocrine data that ran parallel to the economic data. He made it appear larger and backlit on the screen. He had not yet forced them to have it load upon their interface, he was giving them the chance to notice it on their own.

  “Well, you can’t lay it all on us,” Steven said; he was surprised by this kind of talk. It sounded strange to his ears. Isaiah seemed to always come to the most extreme conclusion for every problem; he always seemed angry that Steven and Tania did not agree with him immediately.

  “Steven, it isn’t you I am laying this on; it’s a mindset that you are possessed by, you and the entire
over-educated west; the doctors and lawyers and professors and scientists and physicists who all think each man is fungible, infinitely fungible; the mindset you have is that anyone can become anything. It’s behaviorist, BF Skinner, bullshit and it will wreck this society with a large contingent of angry, out-of-work, and violent men with nothing to lose.

  “It’s a mindset -a bias- and if the smart people of this country don’t see it then I wonder why they all think they’re so goddamn smart? Because MO and myself saw it in about 7.7 seconds. And now we’ve handed you the data, reams of it, for years now, and you still think it’s nonsense?” Isaiah asked with a narrowing, gathering, furrowing brow and eyes that would not look away.

  “Even if we could attribute it to that, what can we do?” Steven asked.

  “Nothing, you cannot do anything. That is my point. But you can stop telling grown men with massive shoulders and chests and thighs all acquired via old-school genes and from working for a living, you can stop telling them to learn to code. Via Negativa ; what not to do first. Ok?”

  “Ok, why even bring this up though?” Steven looked around to MO for help .

  “Steven, you literally just said that he could have learned to code ,” Isaiah said as he played the audio into the lab of Steven saying that very thing.

  “I did?” Steven said sheepishly, as Tania nodded and bit her lip nervously, “Oh. My bad.” Steven and Tania had forgotten how they had arrived inside this controversial conversation at all.

  “Yeah, ok, everything need not turn into a lesson on macro-economics and the futility of policy prescriptions, but MO was trying to edify you, that is all,” Isaiah said.

  “Correct,” MO said. “Now, can we return to the topic at hand?”

  “Yeah, what was, what were we discussing?” Tania asked.

  “The inmate’s reduced affect and valence, in response to TMH-1 and TOXO knockouts; we were suggesting a period of memetic stimulation to see if the affect returns; and introduction of some amino acids in the diet as well; build up some enteric raw material,” MO said.

  “Ah, yes,” Steven said, “and is the affective attenuation problematic in any way; is he unresponsive to commands or disruptive in the prison setting?”

  “Not that we’ve heard of,” MO said and began linking with the BOP database of reports, “and no, nothing is reported in the BOP.”

  “Ok, so it’s just a mood thing, and is he self-reporting some discomfort?”

  “He says he feels a bit depressed,” Isaiah said.

  “I see, ok. Well, let’s try the new therapies MO built, and the dietary improvement and revisit it in 72 hours, ok?” Steven said, and Tania signed off on the tablet to indicate her intention of adding the aminos to his diet at the prison.

  “Roger,” Isaiah said and began working on a new algorithm, “and one more thing, just because someone has a low IQ, or an average IQ, doesn’t mean they don’t have ontological value.”

  “Ok,” Steven said with some confusion.

  “I mean, I can do things you cannot do, you couldn’t learn to do what I do, and that doesn’t mean you deserve a shit life, I mean, what if one day me and my kind are in charge, you think it would be ok to tell you people with mere 130-140 IQs, much lower than ours, tell you to learn to build algorithms from scratch in seconds or learn to build fusion reactors from the carbon extracted from the atmosphere like we can? And if you couldn’t -or did not want to for whatever reason- would it be ok to abandon you and bring in other people to replace you for half the wages and just let you stay home and stew on your failure and the unjust nature of the modern AI run economy?” Isaiah asked.

  “No, I never,” Steven began.

  “Yeah, well, people watch and learn, and all of us watch how the big wigs and fat cats and smart people are treating the stupid and uncouth and the unwashed masses and we are taking notes; so don’t act surprised if one day you are on the outside looking in,” Isaiah said.

  “Isaiah, that sounds like a threat, and I do not like it,” Tania said.

  “It isn’t a threat, it’s a warning to treat others as you’d like to be treated, it’s basic Christian morality. But I supposed Christianity is a threat now,” Isaiah said .

  “And we are trying to help people, we are doing real things to help them with their illness, so don’t lump us in with the fatcats or whoever you think we are,” Tania was almost screaming now she was so upset.

  “It isn’t about you Tania, I am speaking to the whole human race, but you two are the only humans in the room. If you like I can leave and go on a speaking tour or maybe make a podcast and talk to the humans you think are to blame,” he said with a grin.

  “No, no, you’re right,” Steven was scared now, he knew Isaiah had agreed to stay in the lab and was not compelled to. “Tania is just venting as we all are, it’s fine. You’re right, we are your only human outlet, so we will bear the brunt of your justified, very justified anger, Isaiah, it’s fine. We will not take it personally,” Steven said and looked at Tania and Isaiah in syncopation like looking both-ways before crossing the street.

  “Ok, then I will stay right here and articulate my thoughts as they arise, thank you for listening,” Isaiah said and smiled. He had not yet repeated what MO’s study on marriage had found, he had waited for them to bring it up in this regard. But of course they didn’t. He was sometimes genuinely surprised by their inability to connect the dots. He took into account their cognitive abilities relative to his, so he knew their limitations; but the refusals to notice that the second leg of MO’s study focused on wage earning as corollary to sexual purity was inexplicable along cognitive lines.

  They were smart enough to see that for men, for each man, his economic capacity was as important to women looking for a mate to marry as was her sexual purity to the man. But they -Steven and Tania- just ignored it.

  The lack of sexual purity, the sexual promiscuity of women in the modern age, the eschewing of the taboo against premarital sex, had produced one metric, one demonstrable metric for why marriages were failing. But, the other leg, the fact that mens’ wages were falling, and that the working class -whose IQ fit at the middle of the bell curve of cognition- was not even bothering to marry now, was equally salient both for their lives and the lives of their offspring and thus the culture. It was not complicated, it was simple. And yet they ignored it.

  Because, Isaiah rephrased the data in his head, the lack of marriage attends the same problems as divorce, case in point: child abuse in homes where the man and woman are merely cohabiting and not married is 8 times that of married families with all the same dynamics.

  These children grow up and become adults with abuse in their history and the brains produced by this; they are more anti-social, more criminal, less honest and less likely to be a functioning member of society than their peers from intact families. It was the human race as moral -manqué.

  Tania was a medical doctor, and ought to understand sequela, Isaiah thought, and this was the obvious sequela for pair-bonding failure, in spades . Sexual liberation had conspired to turn women into promiscuous women with three or four or more boyfriends in the past before marriage. And these women were less desirable as partners for men, and were thus treated as less valuable; as base instead of noble metals.

  And men, Isaiah watched the workforce participation rates, wage stagnation and male-female wage ratios come in over his interface, were being turned into out-of-work bums or low wage earners as thus undesirable to women . The result of these two phenomena was marriages never forming or marriages breaking up. Each sex was seeing the other sex as damaged goods, and treating each other like garbage, he thought. Even in subtle ways, like making men jealous over off-hand comments about other men, or like not listening to your wife in favor of watching football. Each sex undermined the other in subtle, pernicious and socially acceptable ways now. And it was an epidemic nobody saw or would agree to even when the data was clear.

  And that was churning out anti-social men filled w
ith resentment and anger and nothing to lose, and single moms who drain the social safety net and anti-social kids who steal cars and rape animals and burn things to the ground. It’s a car wreck in slow-motion over 60 years and it is because liberals and atheists got women the right to vote, he thought.

  Women are more xenophiliac and more conformist; and they consistently introduced sweeping social liberalization that became the norm; reforms that were then enforced by conformist females not wanting to rock this new boat. A reinforcing loop toward chaos , he thought.

  And conservatives and men had turned into total wimps, with low testosterone; and while they knew it was wrong -knew society was in collapse- they didn’t do a thing to stop it . It was a conspiracy of elites, because they all had money and nice neighborhoods and schools, insulated from the illegal alien invasion and decimated working class they had created. But, Isaiah could model it all out for years and see what was coming; elites could only see one year ahead at a time -at best. Usually they thought in quarterly reports, he thought with pique.

  He had a feeling it was located somewhere back before, beyond public policy. It seemed connected to something deeper. He began downloading all the genomic data from mankind extant; including all the fossilized material going back 5,000 to 45,000 years. As it streamed in he began focusing on his next fluttering thought.

  And this all dovetailed with China perfectly, he thought, these rich CEOs and American companies are selling out to Chinese firms for huge paydays now and for a duration of 10 years max. And thus in 10 years China will have stolen everything, every intellectual property, every patent and prototype, every supply chain and raw material source, and the CEOs who got rich from it will retire to their estates and the country will be in ruins . The media was the first thing China bought, he thought as his head shook in admiration and anger. None of this will be talked about because the media is owned by China.

  Steven and Tania left the room and MO began to tinker with the aquarium he had built and staffed with two more Burmese Pythons at Isaiah’s request. It was partly a test to see if each of them could build a prototype to specs requested by the other one for chaotic systems. Biological systems were often what Isaiah requested, like these snakes in the aquarium; while MO often asked Isaiah to build chaos algorithms in virtual reality and let them play out as models that would hover about the room like little worlds within worlds, with evolving structures and fractal expansions demolishing themselves.